News Media Depictions of Obama Influence Automatic Attitudes: Implications for the Obama Effect

Abstract

Positive media depictions of Obama likely contribute to the so-called "Obama effect." However, like any attitude-object, effects of those depictions can depend on contextually positive or negative portrayals. We hypothesized that politically conservative news web sites (e.g., FoxNews.com) visually depict Obama more negatively than moderate sites (e.g., CNN. com), and that incidental exposure to such dissimilar depictions can differentially impact perceivers' attitudes toward Obama, particularly when pre-existing attitudes are weak. In Study 1 (n = 111), images of Obama from FoxNews.com were rated more negatively than images of him from CNN. com. In Study 2 (n = 215), participants with weaker attitudes exposed to FoxNews.com images (versus all other images) evinced the most negative SC-IAT bias toward Obama. Thus, incidental exposure to valenced media portrayals can impact attitudes toward public figures. Implications for the Obama effect are discussed.

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“…Results indicated that participants with weaker attitudes developed more negative associations with Obama when repeatedly exposed to his portrayal in a negative manner. [202] Broadly speaking, this work aligns with Columb and Plant (2016) in concluding that while attitude change may be the result of counterstereotypical exemplars, it appeared that "exemplar valence may be the primary cause of the effect." [202] Implicit Attitude Formation Studying the processes behind how individuals form implicit attitudes, Hu, Gawronski, and Balas evaluated two competing theories on the process of evaluative conditioning.…”

“…The first study revealed that undergraduate participants found the news websites' images of Obama varied systematically, as images from FoxNews.com -regardless of whether text accompanied the image-yielded more negative portrayal ratings than CNN.com. [202] A second study used a Single Category IAT (SC-IAT) to assess undergraduate participants' automatic attitudes toward Obama, as well as other measures. Results indicated that participants with weaker attitudes developed more negative associations with Obama when repeatedly exposed to his portrayal in a negative manner.…”