Dose-Dependent Media Priming Effects of Stereotypic Newspaper Articles on Implicit and Explicit Stereotypes

Current research draws a distinction between stereotype activation and application. Building on this differentiation, we present an implicit social cognition model of media priming: Implicit stereotypes (i.e., automatically activated stereotypes) are the outcome of associative processes, whereas explicit stereotypes (i.e., overtly expressed judgments) represent the outcome of propositional processes. We tested some of the model's basic predictions in an experiment. We found that a Gaussian distribution function explained the explicit media priming effect (i.e., decay in effect size at very high dose levels). However, a monotonic function explained the implicit media priming effect. This indicates that stereotypic content may impact implicit stereotypes even if the mass-mediated content is perceived as invalid. We discuss this finding regarding possible media-based reduction strategies.