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The End of Framing As We Know it … and the Future of

Media Effects
a bc d
Michael A. Cacciatore , Dietram A. Scheufele & Shanto Iyengar
a
Department of Advertising & Public Relations, University of Georgia
b
Department of Life Sciences Communication, University of Wisconsin
c
Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany
d
Department of Communication, Department of Political Science, Stanford University
Accepted author version posted online: 11 Aug 2015.

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To cite this article: Michael A. Cacciatore, Dietram A. Scheufele & Shanto Iyengar (2015): The End of Framing As We Know it
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 The End of Framing As We Know it … and the Future of

Media Effects

Michael A. Cacciatore

Department of Advertising & Public Relations, University of Georgia

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Dietram A. Scheufele*

Department of Life Sciences Communication, University of Wisconsin

Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany

Shanto Iyengar

Department of Communication, Department of Political Science, Stanford University

*Address correspondence to Dietram A. Scheufele. Department of Life Sciences

Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1545 Observatory Drive, 309 Hiram Smith

Hall, Madison, WI 53706. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

Framing has become one of the most popular areas of research for scholars in communication and

a wide variety of other disciplines, such as psychology, behavioral economics, political science

and sociology. Particularly in the communication discipline, however, ambiguities surrounding

how we conceptualize and therefore operationalize framing have begun to overlap with other

1
 media effects models to a point that is dysfunctional. This paper provides an in-depth examination

of framing and positions the theory in the context of recent evolutions in media effects research.

We begin by arguing for changes in how communication scholars approach framing as a theoretical

construct. We urge scholars to abandon the general term “framing” altogether, and instead,

distinguish between different types of framing. We also propose that, as a field, we re-focus

attention on the concept’s original theoretical foundations and, more importantly, the potential

empirical contributions that the concept can make to our field and our understanding of media

effects. Finally, we discuss framing as a bridge between paradigms as we shift from an era of mass
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communication to one of echo chambers, tailored information and micro-targeting in the new

media environment.

Keywords

Framing has emerged as one of the most popular areas of research for scholars in

communication. For evidence of this, one need look no further than our conference programs or

the pages of our flagship journals (Scheufele & Iyengar, forthcoming). Yet, despite the attention

paid to the concept, framing is arguably less clear now than at any point in its history. The

ambiguity around the concept begins with a lack of consistency around how the concept is defined

or how these definitions connect with the explanatory models underlying the theory (Scheufele &

Tewksbury, 2007).

The communication literature is rife with different conceptualizations of frames and

framing. Druckman (2001), for instance, lists no fewer than seven definitions of the concept. These

range from frames as “principles of organization” (Goffman, 1974, p. 10), to frames as “principles

of selection, emphasis, and presentation” (Gitlin, 1980, p. 6). Sweetser and Fauconnier (1996)

define frames as “structured understandings of the way aspects of the world function” (p. 5), while

2
 Capella and Jamieson (1997) offer a definition more directly tied to journalism, arguing that

framing is the manner in which a “story is written or produced” (p. 39).

The implications of these varied definitions are twofold. First, there is considerable

disagreement over what exactly constitutes framing. This is perhaps most readily apparent in the

different operationalizations of the concept, particularly between equivalence framing – a form of

framing that involves manipulating the presentation of logically equivalent information – and

emphasis framing – a form of framing that involves manipulating the content of a communication
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(Scheufele & Iyengar, forthcoming). Second, our field has created an understanding of framing

that overlaps with a number of other conceptual models, including priming, agenda setting and

persuasion, and related concepts such as schemas and scripts. This conceptual overlap has left

scholars with an incomplete understanding of the framing concept both in terms of its theoretical

boundaries and, again, methods of operationalization. The result has been movement away from a

rigid conceptualization of framing toward one that captures a wide range of media effects, which

has little to no actual explanatory power, and which provides little understanding of the

mechanisms that distinguish it from other media effects concepts.

Currently, the field of communication produces dozens of framing studies each year, many

of which have little to do with the original conception of framing. Rather than continuing along

this path toward a definition of framing that encompasses virtually all types of persuasive effects

and therefore has extremely limited utility for media effects scholars, we use this paper to propose

clarifications to the framing literature and to signal opportunities for advancing our understanding

of the concept in the new media environment.

First, we suggest that scholars abandon the general “framing” label altogether, and rely on

more specific terminology when discussing their work and the media effects models underlying it.

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 Second, and following from the point above, we argue that, as a field, we must do a much better

job of distinguishing between different types of framing, most notably emphasis and equivalence

framing. Third, we propose an overall re-focusing on the concept, one that examines framing in

terms of its original theoretical foundations and proposed mechanisms, and most importantly, the

potential empirical contributions that the concept can make to our understanding of media effects.

Finally, we outline opportunities for future framing effects research as we move into a new

paradigm of media effects research.

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The Concept of Framing: What it is and isn’t

The framing concept can be found in the literatures of a number of disciplines, but it is

most commonly traced back to a pair of largely unrelated traditions of thinking in psychology and

sociology. Kahneman and Tversky (1979, 1984) are considered the pioneers of framing in the field

of psychology, with Kahneman winning a Nobel Prize in economics for their joint work in 2002.

Tversky and Kahneman’s (1981) oft-cited “Asian disease” study, for instance, looked at how

people respond to otherwise equivalent information that is presented in terms of gains versus

losses. The authors provided participants with a story about a hypothetical outbreak of an unusual

Asian disease that threatened to kill 600 people. Participants were then asked to choose between a

set of alternative options for dealing with the disease. People were decidedly more risk averse

when presented outcomes in terms of gains (lives saved), but risk-seeking when that same

information was presented in terms of losses (lives lost).

The authors were able to replicate this work across a variety of issues (see, for example,

Kahneman, 2011; Kahneman & Tversky, 1984), with the results consistently demonstrating that

human choice is contingent on the description of choice problems, or how information is

4
 contextualized, rather than the expected utility of those options. This conclusion is perhaps best

summarized by Kahneman (2003) himself when he describes perception as “reference dependent”

(p. 459). Work in the vein of Kahneman and Tversky has been labeled equivalency framing

because it relies upon different but logically equivalent words or phrases to produce the framing

effect (Druckman, 2001). In other words, psychology-rooted framing refers to variations in how a

given piece of information is presented to audiences, rather than differences in what is being

communicated.
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The sociological beginnings of framing can best be traced back to Goffman (1974) and,

later, to Gamson and colleagues (Ferree, Gamson, Gerhards, & Rucht, 2002; Gamson, 1985, 1992;

Gamson & Modigliani, 1987, 1989). Driven in part by concerns about the ecological validity of

equivalence-based framing work, the sociological tradition views framing as a means of

understanding how people construct meaning and make sense of the everyday world (Ferree et al.,

2002). Goffman (1974) describes framing as a method by which individuals apply interpretive

schemas to both classify and interpret the information that they encounter in their day-to-day lives,

while Gamson and Modigliani (1987) define frames as “a central organizing idea or story line that

provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events ...The frame suggests what the controversy is

about, the essence of the issue” (p. 143).

Unlike the equivalence-based definition of framing, this sociologically-rooted definition

moves framing outside of the presentation of logically equivalent information and into territory

where the selection of one set of facts or arguments over another can be deemed a frame. As a

result, more leeway is granted to the framing definition in the sociological tradition, with studies

often manipulating what an audience receives rather than how equivalent information is presented.

As work in this vein often involves emphasizing one set of considerations over another, this

5
 sociologically-oriented approach to framing has been labeled “emphasis framing.” Importantly,

this sociological tradition helped galvanize framing work by expanding the scope of studies that

could fall under the framing label. This included, for instance, a growth of emphasis framing

studies in communication focusing on thematic framing, which involves placing an issue in a

general context, and episodic framing, which treats an issue more singularly and without the

context of its thematic-based counterpart (Iyengar, 2005).

Conceptual Overlap Between Framing and Related Concepts?

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An important by-product of the expanded definition of framing brought about by the

sociological-rooted tradition has been that the term is often applied to similar but distinctly

different theoretical concepts. For instance,Minsky (1975) discusses a frame as a cognitive

template or data structure that organizes information in the mind. This description is not unlike

what other scholars have identified as "schemas" or "scripts" (Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Markus &

Zajonc, 1985; Rumelhart, 1984; Schank & Abelson, 1977), concepts that help explain how

individuals cope with the sheer volume of information that is encountered on a day-to-day basis

(Wicks, 1992).

Other disagreements have emerged over the distinctness of framing as compared to other

related communication theories. Framing has been said to overlap with or, in some cases, be

subsumed by theories like priming and agenda setting (e.g., McCombs, 2004; McCombs &

Ghanem, 2001). The bulk of the overlap concerning these disparate communication theories has

to do with issues of applicability and accessibility – specifically, a confusion over whether framing

is based on an applicability or accessibility model. Entman’s (1993) early definition of framing is

built around ideas of selection and salience and – unfortunately – is often used incorrectly to

6
 subsume other media effects models under the framing label. Frames, for Entman, “highlight some

bits of information about an item that is the subject of a communication, thereby elevating them in

salience.” (Entman, 1993, p. 53)

Entman’s definition positions framing as a product of accessibility as opposed to

applicability, and his definition is largely aligned with numerous other salience-based definitions

in the literature. For instance, Gitlin (1980) argues that frames are a means of presentation whereby

certain elements of the communicated text are emphasized or excluded by the communicator.
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These definitions, as well as others not noted here, suggest that framing operates by making some

aspect of a problem or communication more accessible, visible, or salient to an audience.

Of course, agenda setting and priming are also based on models featuring accessibility as

a central construct. Agenda setting refers to the idea that media tell people what to think about

based on issues being covered more frequently or more prominently. By doing so, the media

transfers salience to audiences. In many ways priming can be thought of as an extension of the

agenda setting process (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987). Priming theories are based largely on models of

memory as a network of interconnected cognitive structures or nodes that are used in the storage,

retrieval, and use of information (Anderson, 1985; Collins & Loftus, 1975; Collins & Quillian,

1969). The concept of “spreading activation” explains a process whereby media coverage serves

to increase the salience of an issue in a person’s mind, resulting in that issue being more likely to

serve as a standard by which related issues are evaluated (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987). Put differently,

priming is the process of activating a particular construct in memory resulting in that construct

becoming more available and influential in subsequent thinking (Ratcliff & McKoon, 1988).

The spreading activation theory of priming is based on assumptions of attitude accessibility

and a memory-based model of information processing (Scheufele, 2000). The theory assumes that

7
 people organize perceptions of their surroundings into mental knowledge clusters, and that at any

given moment certain pieces of information or clusters are more accessible than others (Kim,

Scheufele, & Shanahan, 2002). Models of agenda setting and priming therefore assume that

individuals form attitudes based on the most salient considerations at the time of decision-making

(Hastie & Park, 1986; Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007).

Perhaps not surprisingly, the use of salience-based definitions of framing has allowed some

to draw linkages between framing, priming and agenda setting. This school of thought, trained
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mostly in the McCombs/University of Texas-Austin tradition, grouped the three theoretical models

together around the central concept of agenda setting and the salience-based explanations that

underlie it. McCombs and Ghanem (2001), for example, have argued that salience is the key

feature of framing and that this makes framing research little more than a subset or extension of

agenda setting work.

Other researchers are more concerned about subsuming a growing number of media effects

models under a simplified salience-based umbrella. Price, Tewksbury, and Powers (1997), as well

as Scheufele (2000) have therefore argued for the distinctiveness of framing as a research area

worthy of attention. These authors, and others not listed here, contend that agenda setting and

priming involve a different set of cognitive processes than those required by framing. While

agenda setting and priming are said to rely on the notion of attitude accessibility (salience), framing

is rooted in Gestaltpsychologie and attribution theory, which explored the tendency among people

to detect patterns in pieces of information that were consistent with pre-existing cognitive schemas

(Scheufele & Iyengar, forthcoming). As a result, framing operates based on applicability effects

that invoke particular interpretive schemas, which then determine how information is processed

(Scheufele, 2000). Put simply, how information is presented or framed will influence the schema

8
 called upon to process that information. This second school of thought has lobbied for a return to

a more rigid and narrow, equivalency-based definition of framing.

The Importance of the Accessibility-Applicability Distinction

The accessibility-applicability distinction is crucial to our understanding of framing effects

on at least three fronts. First, as noted, Entman’s (Entman, 1991, 1993) definition of framing played

an important role in galvanizing framing work in communication. His 1993 piece, which uses a

salience-based measure of framing based on the emphasis and selection of facts of news articles
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in media, has been cited nearly 1,500 times according to a Web of Science search. Unfortunately,

this salience-based definition of framing is too loose to have practical value as it makes it possible

to argue that any number of differences in communication constitute a difference in framing. First,

his framing measure and much of his own empirical work on the topic (e.g., Entman, 1991) overlap

with early studies in agenda setting (e.g., McCombs & Shaw, 1972), which makes it difficult to

isolate framing effects from those based on agenda setting. Perhaps more problematic, emphasis-

based studies push framing into a more general category of persuasion where any observed effects

may be the result of differences in the persuasive power or quality of a given message, rather than

differences in the way the same information is presented. Again, the result is ambiguity in terms

of what constitutes framing as the concept is difficult to differentiate from other salience-based

theories of media effects.

Second, the accessibility-applicability distinction is important for our understanding of the

mechanisms behind framing, priming and agenda setting. One can reasonably assume that

accessibility effects (priming and agenda setting) will operate, at least to some degree, among all

members of a population (Scheufele & Iyengar, forthcoming). A news article about, for example,

9
 a nuclear disarmament treaty should make that topic more salient among all who happen to read

it, even if factors such as pre-existing knowledge levels might moderate such effects. In other

words, simple exposure to a set of considerations should increase the salience of those

considerations across all parties, regardless of prior experience with the information. The same

cannot be said about applicability effects as an audience member’s pre-existing cognitive schema

or knowledge structures will determine the degree to which a frame will resonate. The presence of

a cognitive schema that matches the frame should produce a framing effect, while a mismatch

between frame and schema should fail to produce such an effect. It has been argued that
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disentangling the different mechanisms underlying priming, agenda setting and framing are critical

for the trajectory of research in each of these different areas (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007).

However, this is especially difficult for salience-based definitions of framing as the mechanisms

behind framing are thought to be the same as those underlying each of priming and agenda setting.

Third, the sociologically-based definition threatens to not only make framing a redundant

communication concept, but also pushes the field of communications toward an outdated and

possibly unwarranted model of media effects that subsumes most effects under a broad persuasive

framing umbrella and abandons what McQuail (2005) calls a “constructed reality” paradigm. This

paradigm has been built on the belief that mass media has potentially strong effects on attitudes

and information processing, but that any effects were contingent on a host of individual-level

characteristics (McQuail, 2005). As discussed above, accessibility effects, those mechanisms by

which priming and agenda setting are believed to operate, are considered more ubiquitous than

framing effects, which should only manifest among audiences with a schema that matches a given

framing manipulation.

10
 As a result, this loose definition of framing has undoubtedly contributed to making framing

effects appear as much more widespread and powerful than they actually are. This conceptual

overreach tends to manifest itself in two areas. First, countless new self-identified framing studies

are focused on identifying different categories of frames in communication content. After more

than four decades of framing research, one would expect these studies to operate at least in part

deductively, and explore frames that previous research has shown to resonate well with culturally-

shared schemas among audiences. Especially in the communication discipline, however, there

seems to be little consistency across studies in the types of content (or ‘framing’) categories
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identified. Instead, many studies continue to inductively explore issue-specific content categories

or even use clustering techniques to mine content data for what they call ‘frames,’ with little

conceptual concern for how these content categories would impact audiences within a framing

effects model.

As argued elsewhere (Scheufele & Iyengar, forthcoming), this conceptual fuzziness

severely limits the usefulness of the framing concept for our discipline. Using the framing label to

describe virtually any issue-related content category has muddled the concept to the point where

it is indistinguishable from other effects models, including a host of persuasive media effects. This

problem is particularly salient for studies that are explicitly concerned with testing framing effects

in experimental settings. Unless these studies are able to conceptually and operationally

disentangle salience-based or persuasive effects, on the one hand, and framing-based presentation

effects, on the other hand, most of the effects they identify are likely confounded and tap different

effects models at the same time without being able to disentangle their unique contribution to the

criterion variable.

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 As a result, findings falsely attributed to framing may signify an unnecessary and

unwarranted return to the media effects paradigms of the past. This is not to say that framing is not

a powerful theory of communication, but rather, that ubiquitous framing effects downplay the role

of cognitive schema in producing framing effects. Instead of looking backward toward such

models, we argue that framing theory can act as a bridge forward to a fifth, new paradigm of media

effects for our new media environment. We will expand upon this point shortly, but first, we make

the case that a paradigm shift is in order for framing itself.

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Toward a Paradigm Shift in Framing Research

Given the conceptual and operational confusion that surrounds the framing concept, we

believe a paradigm shift is in order for scholars working in this area. Our scattered

conceptualization of framing has resulted in a disjointed literature on the subject. In the current

communication literature, framing effects can be used to explain nearly everything, thereby

making the concept essentially meaningless for communication scholars. As a result, we need to

re-evaluate framing and all that we think we know about the concept.

The first step in this process is to return to a more rigid and rigorous definition of framing

effects. Most notably, this means moving away from emphasis framing operationalizations that

blur the lines between frames and primes, media agendas, and other informational or persuasive

features of a message. Instead, we propose framing research be both terminologically and

conceptually refocused around equivalence-based definitions that are more directly tied to

alterations in the presentation of information rather than the persuasive value of that information.

While this narrows the scope of framing work, by eliminating emphasis-based manipulations, it

should not be read as an attempt to stifle framing research. Quite the contrary, we view this as an

12
 opportunity to expand the ways by which we produce equivalence frames. These might include

movement away from text-based framing manipulations and movement toward frames based on

non-verbal or visual cues (for an overview, see Scheufele & Iyengar, forthcoming).

Second, we propose a renewed interest in the mechanisms behind framing research. While

framing studies have exploded in recent years, the exact process behind the phenomenon remains

a contentious issue, and one for which only a limited amount of research exists. We argue that the

best way to understand framing is to explicate the mechanisms behind the phenomenon (as well
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as related phenomena such as priming and agenda setting). Moreover, the most fruitful way of

pursuing these ends is to pay greater attention to the historical and theoretical foundations of these

concepts.

According to Price et al. (1997), “[a] framing effect is one in which salient attributes of a

message (its organization, selection of content, or thematic structure) render particular thoughts

applicable, resulting in their activation and use in evaluations” (p. 486). Their conceptualization

suggests that the act of reading a news article will determine which stored knowledge structure (or

schema) becomes active. In turn, the activated knowledge structure will be used to interpret the

news article. In this respect, choices made by journalists and editors can play a role in determining

the cognitive schema that a reader will apply to a news story.

One of the operational problems associated with framing and related research, however, is

that it can often prove difficult to isolate framing effects from agenda setting and priming effects.

This is because issues tend to be framed in a consistent manner as they emerge on the public agenda

(Downs, 1972). This is in part due to the journalistic norms associated with the issue-attention

cycle, but also because journalists, just like everyone else, learn about issues in large part based

on the frames that are used to define them.

13
 Nonetheless, efforts have been made to distinguish framing from its accessibility-based

counterparts. In fact, one of the seminal studies of framing in a media effects context started from

this premise and demonstrated that news story frames can influence attributions of responsibility

related to terrorism (Iyengar, 1987). Specifically, when news stories about terrorism focused on

isolated cases or events, respondents were more likely to attribute responsibility to the individual

terrorists. Conversely, when news stories linked terrorism events to a more general political

context, respondents were more likely to attribute responsibility elsewhere, advocating for more

social reform to combat the issue. This work fits with Price and Tewksbury’s (1997)
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conceptualization of framing and priming effects as it suggests the “knowledge activation potential

of news story frames” (p. 500). Moreover, it shows that the frames used in news stories provide

the context that shapes subsequent understanding of the news. What this study fails to do, however,

is differentiate the mechanisms behind framing and priming or chronic accessibility.

As theirs is the most promising model for differentiating the mechanisms of priming,

framing and agenda setting, scholars should devise research to test the ideas put forth in Price and

Tewksbury’s (1997) knowledge activation model, specifically those concerning the mechanisms

underlying framing, priming and agenda setting. Research that takes advantage of advances in

response latency measures might be one method of doing so as latency measures can provide tests

of the accessibility of constructs in memory. Similarly, experiments that leverage the power of

chronically accessible constructs, while providing frames that either match or fail to match the pre-

existing cognitive schemas of participants, might be another method of tapping into the differences

between accessibility and applicability in this domain. Regardless of the specific approach,

attention should be paid to the foundations of these three media effects models and the unique

mechanisms underlying each.

14
 Framing and a New Paradigm of Framing Effects Research

The advent of new media and Web 2.0 technologies, including Facebook, Twitter,

Instagram, and other forms of social networking, is forcing communication scholars to rethink

traditional effects models (Bennett & Iyengar, 2008).

Our field has long been characterized by a Kuhnsian (Kuhn, 1962) oscillation between

paradigms of strong and weak media effects (McQuail, 2005) (see Figure 1). The magic bullet or

hypodermic needle models before World War II were based on assumptions about direct, uniform
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and powerful persuasive effects that did not undergo significant empirical tests in real-world

settings.

In response to these simple stimulus-response models, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues (Katz

& Lazarsfeld, 1955; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1948) collected large-scale panel survey data

from multiple communities to examine opinion change during U.S. election campaigns. Eventually

rejecting many of the assumptions of the magic bullet paradigm, this second paradigm of effects

models concluded that media effects were limited due to two factors. First, Lazarsfeld and

colleagues found that opinion change was not triggered directly by mass media, but occurred

indirectly, mediated by influential opinion leaders who were more likely to attend to mass

mediated messages and – in turn – passed on messages to other members of their social network.

In addition, Lazarsfeld and colleagues concluded, media effects were minimal since they largely

reinforced existing partisan attitudes among voters who selectively exposed themselves to content

that fit their prior beliefs.

In the early 1970s, Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann (1973) announced a third paradigm of media

effects with her call for a “return to the concept of powerful mass media.” Her work on the spiral

15
 of silence (Noelle-Neumann, 1973, 1974, 1984) and Gerbner’s cultivation studies (Gerbner &

Gross, 1974; Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 2002) shared two important assumptions

about media. Mass-mediated messages, both Noelle-Neumann and Gerbner argued, might have

much stronger effects than Lazarsfeld and his colleagues assumed in a pre-television age, given

the ubiquitous and consonant nature of media messages. Frequent exposure to consonant mediated

messages can therefore shape our perceptions of what everyone else around us thinks (Noelle-

Neumann, 1984), but also of what the world around us looks like (Gerbner & Gross, 1974).
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McQuail’s fourth and final paradigm had its theoretical roots in the 1970s but really came

to fruition in the 1980s and 90s. Concepts, such as priming, agenda setting and framing, posited

that mass media had potentially strong effects on attitudes and information processing, but that

these effects were contingent on individual-level characteristics, including value predispositions

and cognitive schema (McQuail, 2005).

Rapidly changing media environments and evolving audience behaviors within these

environments, however, have begun to push into what we identify as a fifth current paradigm of

media effects research: preference-based effects models. As illustrated in Figure 1, preference-

based models combine elements of strong and weak effects models.

The most coherent argument for weak preference-based effects models has been put forth

by Bennett and Iyengar (2008). In their essay on a new area of minimal effects, as they call it, they

summarize growing evidence from psychology, political science and media effects research

suggesting that an increasingly fragmented (online) news environment will match up audiences

primarily with information that fits their prior beliefs. As a result, media effects in these new

information environments might be limited to what we call preference-based reinforcement in

Figure 1.

16
 Preference-based reinforcement is driven by three related phenomena: (a) a motivation

among media outlets to narrowcast information toward ideologically fragmented publics

(Maddow, 2010) or even toward specific individuals in the case of Facebook or other social media

(Scheufele & Nisbet, 2012) in order to create more lucrative advertising environments; (b) a

tendency among individual audience members to not just select (Yeo, Xenos, Brossard, &

Scheufele, 2015) and interpret (Kunda, 1990) information consistently with their prior beliefs, but

also to rely on highly homophilic self-selected online social networks – often labeled “echo

chambers” (Sunstein, 2007) or “filter bubbles” (Pariser, 2011) – that further narrow our
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information diets and interpretation of new information; (c) new interface of media and audiences,

such as tailored results from search engines (Ladwig, Anderson, Brossard, Scheufele, & Shaw,

2010) or personalized news aggregators, that lead to narrower and narrower information tailoring

based on information infrastructures that are informed by both voluntary and involuntary user

input.

In addition to evidence pointing toward more limited, reinforcement-based effects,

however, preference-based effects models might also open up new ways of thinking about strong

media effects. In Figure 1, we subsumed these approaches under the label “tailored persuasion.”

In many ways, they are similar to the idea of personalized medicine, i.e., treatments that are tailored

toward a patient’s genome or other characteristics and therefore are much more effective than

traditional medicines or treatments would be.

On an anecdotal level, the realities of modern election campaigns are a good example of

this new idea of tailored persuasion. In the 2012 presidential race, for instance, Barack Obama

employed a team of statisticians and social media strategists to mine large amounts of data on

individual voters in order to develop more effective modes of persuading voters to adopt issue

17
 stances, donate money or turn out on Election Day (Issenberg, 2012). There is also some initial

experimental evidence suggesting that the same tendency to self-select into highly homogenous

social networks that produces preference-based reinforcement, as discussed above, might also

promote the exchange of belief-inconsistent information among audiences once that information

does enter their network. As Messing and Westwood (2012) summarize their findings:

“In the context of the diverse social, work, school, and intergenerational familial ties

maintained via online networking websites, the odds of exposure to counterattitudinal information
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among partisans and political news among the disaffected strike us as substantially higher than

interpersonal discussion or traditional media venues.” (p. 17)

As a result, the same online environments that can produce more reinforcement effects as

part of a “preference-based effects” paradigm might also produce audience-media interactions that

in fact increase the likelihood of belief-inconsistent persuasive messaging reaching audience

members.

Most important in the context of this essay, however, is the role that framing can play in

the context of tailored persuasion. In other words, is it possible to increase the effectiveness of a

message by changing the way the information is presented and – therefore – which cognitive

schema audiences use when making sense of the information? The most convincing evidence that

this might be possible has been provided by Bailenson, Iyengar, Yee, and Collins (2008). Their

experimental work showed that photoshopped images of hypothetical candidates that integrated

facial features of the viewer (without him or her being aware) produced significantly higher

likability ratings than unedited images. As argued elsewhere (Scheufele & Iyengar, forthcoming),

the mechanisms behind this effect are very similar to applicability-based framing effects. Simply

by embedding the information in a familiar (visual) context, the researchers were able to evoke

18
 different interpretive schemas and, as a result, produce more persuasive messages. The idea of

visual framing continues to be underexplored, however, especially in light of a new tailored

persuasion paradigm.

In closing, we are not ready to declare framing completely dead yet. We do argue, however,

that a much narrower conceptual understanding of framing is the only way for our discipline to

move forward in this area of effects research in ways that (a) produce meaningful intellectual

contributions to our field, and (b) do not render the contributions from media effects research
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irrelevant to behavioral economics, psychology, sociology and other disciplines from which the

concept has been borrowed in the first place.

At the very minimum, this means that media effects research should abandon the general

term “framing” as a catch-all phrase for a number of distinct media effects models, and replace it

with the more precise terminological distinction between equivalence and emphasis framing. This

will not only help resolve some of the terminological confusion that has surrounded framing

research for decades (Scheufele, 1999) but also help clarify the very distinct mechanisms that

underlie both models. As we begin to explore the new paradigm of preference-based effects

models, (visual) equivalence framing may be crucial in helping us understand strong media effects,

in spite of media fragmentation and filter bubbles. Researchers in the area of emphasis frames,

however, will be increasingly faced with the challenge of distinguishing their understanding of

framing effects from other persuasive media effects mechanisms in these new communication

environments.

Author Biographies

19
 Michael A. Cacciatore is an assistant professor in the Department of Advertising and Public

Relations at the University of Georgia. His research focuses on risk communication with an

emphasis on media coverage of risk and opinion formation for risk topics.

Dietram A. Scheufele is the John E. Ross Professor in Science Communication and Vilas

Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Honorary

Professor at the Technische Universität Dresden, Germany. His research deals with the interface

of media, policy and public opinion.

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Shanto Iyengar is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication and

Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His current research addresses the

connections between exposure to news and political polarization.

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Figure 1. A chronology of media effects paradigms.