Media accounts typically employ two types of information: (a) general statements about the range or importance of a problem (base-rate information), and (b) illustrative individual cases (exemplars) that are less valid but more vivid. A review of the psychological literature on judgments leads to the general hypothesis that the perception of a problem is influenced primarily by the quality and distribution of exemplars. In a series of five experiments, the researchers varied the number and quality of exemplars and their consistency with the base-rate information for several journalistic stories. The results indicate that base-rate information had almost no impact whereas exemplars had a strong effect on the perceived distribution of public opinion about story problems. Exemplars also had a moderate impact on subjects' personal opinions about the problem. Implications for communication research and journalistic practice are discussed.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Bar-Hillel, M.
(1980). The base-rate fallacy in probability judgements. Acta Psychologica, 44, 211-233.
2.
Bodenhausen, G. V.
, & Wyer, R. S., Jr. (1987). Social cognition and social reality: Information acquisition and use in the laboratory and the real world. In H. J. Hippler, N. Schwarz, & S. Sudman (Eds.), Social information processing and survey methodology (pp. 6-41). New York: Springer.
3.
Brendel, D.
, & Grobe, B. E. (1976). Journalistisches Grundwissen. Darstellung der Formen und Mittel journalistischer Arbeit und Einführung in die Anwendung empirischer Daten in den Massenmedien (Basic knowledge of journalism. Forms and means of journalistic work and an introduction to the use of empirical data in mass media). München: Saur.
4.
Brosius, H.-B.
(1993). The effects of emotional pictures in television news. Communication Research, 20, 105-124.
5.
Brosius, H.-B.
, Breinker, C., & Esser, F. (1991). Der “Immermehrismus”: Journalistisches Stilmittel oder Realitätsverzerrung (“More and more”: Journalistic style or distortion of reality). Publizistik,36, 407-427.
6.
Brosius, H.-B.
, & Mundorf, N. (1990). Eins und eins ist ungleich zwei: Differentielle Aufmerksamkeit, Lebhaftigkeit von Information und Medienwirkung (One and one does not equal two: Differential attention, vividness and media effects). Publizistik, 35, 398-407.
7.
Chaiken, S.
(1980). Heuristic versus systematic information processing and the use of source versus message cues in persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 752-766.
8.
Chaiken, S.
, & Eagly, A. H. (1976). Communication modality as a determinant of message persuasiveness and message comprehensibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 605-614.
9.
Chaiken, S.
, & Stangor, C. (1987). Attitudes and attitude change. Annual Review of Psychology, 38, 575-630.
10.
Collins, R. L.
, Taylor, S. E., Wood, J. V., & Thompson, S. C. (1988). The vividness effect: Illusive or illusory?Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 24, 1-18.
11.
Gavanski, I.
, & Roskos-Ewoldsen, D. (1991). Representativeness and conjoint probability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 181-194.
12.
Good, I. J.
(1968). Statistical fallacies. In The international encyclopedia for the social sciences (vol. 5, pp. 292-301). New York: Macmillan/Free Press.
13.
Haller, M.
(1987). Die Reportage: Ein Handbuch fur Journalisten (Reporting a story: A handbook for journalists). München: Olschlager.
14.
Hamill, R.
, Wilson, T. D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1980). Insensitivity of sample bias: Generalizing from atypical cases. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 578-589.
15.
Heuer, F.
, & Reisberg, D. (1990). Vivid memories of emotional events: The accuracy of remembered minutiae. Memory & Cognition, 8(5), 496-506.
16.
Higgins, E. T.
, & Bargh, J. A. (1987). Social cognition and social perception. Annual Review of Psychology, 38, 369-425.
17.
Huff, D.
(1959). How to take a chance. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books.
18.
Iyengar, S.
(1990). The accessibility bias in politics: Television news and public opinion. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 2, 1-15.
19.
Iyengar, S.
(1991). Is anyone responsible? How television frames political issues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
20.
Iyengar, S.
, & Kinder, D. R. (1987). News that matters. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
21.
Kahneman, D.
, & Tversky, A. (1973). On the psychology of prediction. Psychological Review, 80, 237-251.
22.
Lichtenstein, S.
, Slovic, P., Fischhoff, B., Lavman, M., & Combs, B. (1978). Judged frequency of lethal events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4, 551-578.
23.
McArthur, L. Z.
(1981). What grabs you? The role of attention in impression formation and causal attribution. In E. T. Higgins, C. Herman, & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), Social cognition: The Ontario Symposium, Vol. 1 (pp. 201-246). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
24.
Meehl, P.
, & Rosen, A. (1955). Antecedent probability and the efficiency of psychometric signs, patterns, or cutting scores. Psychological Bulletin, 52, 194-215.
25.
Meyer, P.
(1973). Precision journalism: A reporter's introduction to social science methods. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
26.
Nisbett, R. E.
, & Ross, L. (1980). Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
27.
Noelle-Neumann, E.
(1980). Die Schweigespirale: Öffentliche Meinung, unsere soziale Haut (The spiral of silence: Public opinion, our social skin). München: Piper.
28.
Noelle-Neumann, E.
(1992). Manifeste und latente Funktion Öffentlicher Meinung (Manifest and latent functions of public opinion). Publizistik, 37, 283-297.
29.
Petty, R. E.
, & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). Communication and persuasion. New York: Springer.
30.
Rips, L. J.
(1990). Reasoning. Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 321-353.
31.
Sherman, S. J.
, & Corti, E. (1984). Cognitive heuristics. In R. S. Wyer, Jr. & T. C. Srull (Eds.), Handbook of social cognition: Vol. 1 (pp. 189-286). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
32.
Singer, E.
, & Endreny, P. (1986). The reporting of social science research in the mass media. In S. J. Ball-Rokeach & M. G. Cantor (Eds.), Media, audience, and social structure (pp. 293-312). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
33.
Taylor, S. E.
, & Fiske, S. T. (1975). Point of view and perceptions of causality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 439-445.
34.
Taylor, S. E.
, & Fiske, S. T. (1978). Salience, attention, and attribution: Top of the head phenomena. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology: Vol. 11 (pp. 249-288). New York: Academic Press.
35.
Taylor, S. E.
, & Thompson, S. C. (1982). Stalking the elusive “vividness” effect. Psychological Review, 89, 155-181.
36.
Tversky, A.
, & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5, 207-232.
37.
von Winterfeldt, D.
, John, R. S., & Borcherding, K. (1981). Components of risk ratings. Risk Analysis, 1, 277-287.
38.
Wilson, M. G.
, Northcraft, G. B., & Neale, M. A. (1989). Information competition and vividness effects in on-line judgments. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 4, 132-139.
39.
Wyer, R. S., Jr.
, & Srull, T. K. (1986). Human cognition in its social context. Psychological Review, 93, 322-359.
40.
Zillmann, D., Perkins, J. W., & Sundar, S. S. (1991). Impression-formation effects of printed news varying in descriptive precisions and exemplification. Unpublished manuscript, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
41.
Zillmann, D.
, Perkins, J. W., & Sundar, S. S. (1992). Impression-formation effects of printed news varying in descriptive precision and exemplifications. Medienpsychologie, 4, 168-185.
