Toward a Dose-Response Account of Media Priming

We present a dose-response (DR) account of media priming. DR concepts describe the relationship between a dose and the elicited response and, thus, allow us to study dose-dependent media priming effects. We report empirical evidence from an experiment (N = 351) for the DR relationship between exposure to stereotypic newspaper content and readers’ stereotypic social reality estimates. We investigated the change in the media priming effect size by utilizing nine experimentally manipulated dose-conditions (i.e., frequency of the media prime). The empirical data appeared in the form of a Gaussian distribution function: We were able to document (1) a threshold dose, which generally allows us to specify the acceptable daily intake of potentially harmful media content. Furthermore, (2) we found a decline in the effect size at very high dose levels. We argue that a DR account as a supplement to contemporary approaches can be beneficial for media priming research.