Social mobility or social change? How different groups react to identity-related news

Abstract

In times of identity politics, journalists use group primes to organize events and reduce their complexity. Because research has mostly investigated the effects of single group primes on opinion formation and news selection, two aspects of group primes in the news have remained understudied: (1) whether they directly affect group identification itself, and (2) how these effects differ between groups. This experiment (N = 750) shows that group primes in the news cause awareness of citizens’ membership in these groups. However, citizens’ perceived group importance diverges between groups: priming groups that likely have a social change mindset increases their perceived importance, while priming groups that likely have a social mobility mindset does not. Accordingly, the effects of group primes in the news depend on shared notions of a group's status in society and the rigidity of its boundary. These findings considerably advance contemporary understanding of differential news effects relating to group identification.