Human Interest, Attitudes and Political Policies

Neely

Given our social nature and keen propensity to attend to information about others, how does the presence of the person in the human-interest media frame influence our understanding of political policies? An experiment tests hypotheses that the person in the frame will (1) distract the audience and hinder efforts to encode the issue information, and (2) lead to issue attitudes that are shaped by one’s feelings for the person. The results support the latter — overall approval of the policy and tendencies for bias toward it are linked considerably to attitudes about the person. However, no evidence of distraction were found — both person-centered and person-less narratives facilitated accurate understanding of the issue. Implications and future refinements are discussed.