Threatening Information: An Experiment on the Effect of Terrorism News on Foreign Policy Attitudes

By Shana Kushner Gadarian

More than five years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, terrorism still occupies a sizeable proportion of the nightly news. In 2006 alone, more than 700 news stories on terrorism aired on national network news, adding to the more than 4,300 stories related to terrorism that aired in the previous four years. Compare those 5,000 terrorism stories to 138 stories on poverty, 592 stories on education, and 724 stories on crime over the same time period, and the dominance of terrorism news is clear.

As part of a larger study on how sensationalistic media coverage affects foreign policy attitudes, I designed and ran a media experiment using a nationally representative sample of 1,229 adults through Polimetrix.8. The experiment was designed to uncover the mechanism by which television influences attitudes—threatening message content or content paired with threatening imagery—and to determine the causal impact of media exposure on attitudes in a way that secondary survey data cannot.

Subjects of the experiment received an email invitation to participate in the study and were randomly assigned to watch one of three videos showing stories that had aired on the national news in early fall 2005. The subjects, who completed the experiment online in December 2006, were randomly assigned to either the control group or one of two treatment groups. Those in the treatment conditions watched a story about the potential for a new wave of terrorism. All of these respondents received exactly the same information about terrorism from the videos: that government authorities were troubled by the increase in smaller-scale terrorist attacks such as the ones in London, Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, and Madrid, and were concerned that the attacks might signal a new wave of terrorism. The story emphasized the potential for new terrorist attacks in the near future.

What differed between the treatment groups was the visual imagery of the videos they were shown. The “scary visuals” group viewed the story with evocative imagery of terrorism, while the “neutral visuals” group viewed the same story with neutral imagery instead. In the scary visuals video, the terrorism news story was edited to enhance the threatening nature of the visual imagery, adding, for example, such images as the burning World Trade Center and bloodied victims of the London subway bombings. In the neutral visuals condition, the visuals were replaced by less violent imagery. For example, in place of the London victims, the neutral condition included maps of the London subway system. Respondents in the neutral visuals condition received threatening information only through the verbal content, while those in the scary visuals condition received threatening information through both the verbal and visual story components. Control subjects watched an unrelated story on India’s economy. Table 1 summarizes the design of the experiment.

Click table to go to videos

To measure the effects of exposure to these different stories on foreign policy attitudes, respondents in each group answered a series of questions after watching the videos. I used a statistical procedure called ordinary least squares (OLS) to analyze the effect of exposure to the videos and respondents’ concern about terrorism on two measures of foreign policy attitudes—a foreign policy index and a measure of militarism. I created the foreign policy index using six questions found on the 2002 survey for the American National Election Studies (NES). An additive index, it contained five questions on, respectively, federal spending on foreign aid, homeland security, approval of the president’s handling of terrorism, approval of the government’s handling of terrorism, and whether the war in Iraq was worth the cost. The militarism question asked respondents to place themselves on a seven-point scale indicating how they thought the government should “handle international problems,” with diplomacy/international pressure at one end and military force at the other.

The OLS procedure controlled for the effect of respondent’s prior level of hawkishness (that is, preference for military action over diplomacy), measured before exposure to the videos, as well as respondent’s pretest level of threat (that is, how likely he or she believed there would be a terrorist attack in the next year).

Results of the analysis indicated that perception of the threat of terrorism—how vulnerable respondents believe the country is to a terrorist attack—significantly increases preferences for militarism over diplomacy in international affairs. Additionally, and most relevantly, the effect of threat on attitudes was greatest for respondents in the scary visuals condition.