One Image, Different Views: A Cognitivist Experiment on the Perception of News Diversity

The phenomenon of expectancy consistent schematic filtering—or ‘selective perception’ for short—affects how much attention recipients give to information contained in the news, how they interpret this information and also and how much information they retain. In order to better understand the phenomenon of selective perception, an experiment was developed in which 180 respondents were confronted with one of three press photographs in which ethnically colored subjects are shown in a stereo-typical, counter-stereotypical and a-typical way. This experiment is based cognitivist method of frame analysis that investigates how media messages ‘resonate’ with the mental schemes of recipients. Resonance analysis is an inductive method of frame analysis that combines elicitation tests, semantic coding and cluster analysis. One of the advantages of this approach is that it allows to operationalize and to analyze both the ‘representation frames’ embedded in media messages and the ‘interpretation frames’ embroiled in people’s minds in conceptually identical and computable terms.