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13 October 2005

Once upon a time...

A good well-told story is a powerful frame. Adam Berinsky of MIT and Donald Kinder of the University of Michigan show this in a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Politics entitled, "Making Sense of Issues through Media Frames: Understanding the Kosovo Crisis." Here's the abstract:

How do people make sense of politics? Integrating empirical results in communication studies on framing with models of comprehension in cognitive psychology, we argue that people understand complicated event sequences by organizing information in a manner that conforms to the structure of a good story. To test this claim, we carried out a pair of experiments. In each, we presented people with news reports on the 1999 Kosovo crisis that were framed in story form, either to promote or prevent U.S. intervention. Consistent with expectations, we found that framing news about the crisis as a particular story affected what people remembered, how they structured what they remembered, and the opinions they expressed on the actions government should take.

Berinsky and Kinder use an experiment where they have subjects read "newspaper articles" (which they have written) about the Kosovo Crisis. The articles convey the same information and are almost exactly the same in regard to the text. The only thing the authors manipulate are the organizational structure of the articles and their section headings. They find that the narrative structure of the article is a powerful frame and can in turn structure the attitudes of a reader.

I like the article a lot. The experiment is well thought out and they actually do it twice -- once before 9/11 (in Michigan) and once after 9/11 (in New Jersey).

A few thoughts:

  • Berinsky and Kinder make the (key) point that people organize information around a "good story." Is there no distinction between a frame and the "good story"? The "good story" hypothesis seems more complex than the usual frames that I think of. It also seems to be structural as well as literal. Upon my initial reading, I thought they were drawing a distinction between the frame and the "good story," which I thought made sense.
  • They (at least implicitly suggest that this type of framing doesn't occur in newspapers. Are their findings generalizable to other types of media (especially TV).
  • What about the duration of the framing effects? Since they're interested in cognition and opinion formation and not just a one time question wording effect, I was left wondering how long the frame stayed with the subject. If the treated groups were asked later would they still retain the frame? If they read the control article, would they retain the frame?

I hope the contrived newspaper articles are included in the appendix of the journal article. I spent serveral minutes comparing the three conditions, convinced that they were not the same.

Posted by Andrew Reeves at October 13, 2005 11:25 AM