Truth in Fiction: The Consequences of Fictional Framing for Political Opinions

Abstract

On a typical evening at the end of July, 2009, about 20 million Americans watched the nightly news broadcasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC. That same week, according to the Neilsen ratings, more than twice that number - about 45 million - watched crime dramas on CBS alone. The preference for entertainment over news among average Americans comes as no surprise to anyone with even a passing awareness of the public’s use of its free time. And yet, despite the fact that most people spend much more time watching entertainment media than news, almost all of what we know about the effects of mass media on political attitudes and behavior comes from theories and research that are focused on, and largely limited to, news media. Although some recent work has dealt with the consequences of late night political comedy, talk shows, and news packaged as entertainment, even this “soft” news carries the patina of factuality, however light and sensationalized. Media researchers in general, and political scientists in particular, have largely ignored explicitly fictional entertainment media - movies, sitcoms, and the like - assuming it has few, if any, real world implications. In this study, I take the opposite view. I posit that fictional entertainment media contain many politically-relevant themes, messages, plots, sub- plots, stereotypes, characters, and portrayals, all of which may influence viewers in any number of ways.

In the next section, I sketch the outlines of a theory of fictional media influence. While fiction is fabricated and most people can fairly easily discern fiction from nonfiction, I posit that they nonetheless use fiction, selectively, to inform their beliefs, opinions, and behavior. In this study I focus on one potential type of fictional influence. In the section that follows, I argue that fictional media, like news media, frame political issues in certain ways, and the way that they frame an issue affects how viewers perceive it, their beliefs about it, and, ultimately, their attitudes toward it. I discuss how this likely occurs and the ways it might affect viewers. Following this, I present my first cut at the results of an experiment designed to test the effects of fictional framing on beliefs and attitudes. Participants were assigned at random to watch one of two movies that played widely at the box office, were well received, won awards, and framed the issue of unplanned pregnancy in different ways. About half watched Cider House Rules, which framed the issue in terms of the problems that would arise when abortion is illegal. The other half watched the movie Bel la, which framed the issue in terms of the choice of adoption. I chose the issue of unplanned pregnancy because it is one that is familiar to most people and opinions about the related subject of abortion tend to be entrenched. The results show that these different fictional frames of unplanned pregnancy influenced participants’ beliefs and opinions about legalized abortion in ways consistent with the movies’ framing of the issue. As a result of watching the movies, those who watched Cider House Rules were more favorable toward legalized abortion and those who watched Bel la where less so.

I then consider the process by which fictional media influence attitudes and the factors that may increase or decrease the effects of fictional framing. Although this analysis is preliminary, the results are nonetheless consistent with a simple persuasion model of influence. I show that watching the movies changed beliefs about abortion which, in turn, changed opinions. Finally, I test two potential moderators of fictional framing. First, the extent to which participants were mentally absorbed into the movie and, second, how realistic they perceived the movie to be. The results suggest that people who were absorbed into the story and who saw it as the kind of thing that could happen in real life were more influenced than those who were less absorbed and perceived it as less realistic. I conclude by discussing the results in light of our understanding of mass media influence on public opinion.