Framing Effects, Social Norm Perception, and Tolerance of Lesbian and Gay Individuals: Experimental Evidence from Slovakia

Social outliers draw a lot of attention from those inside and outside their group and yet little is known about their impact on perceptions of their group as a whole. The present studies examine how outliers influence observers’ summary perceptions of a group’s behavior and inferences about the group’s descriptive and prescriptive norms. Across four studies (N = 1739) we examine how observers perceive descriptive and prescriptive social norms in groups containing outliers of varying degrees. We find consistent evidence that observers overweight outlying behavior when judging the descriptive and prescriptive norms, but overweight outliers less as they become more extreme, especially in perceptions of the prescriptive norm. We find this pattern across norms pertaining to punctuality (Studies 1-2, 4) and clothing formality (Study 3) and for outliers who are both prescriptively and descriptively deviant (e.g. late arrivers), as well as for outliers who are only descriptive deviants (e.g. early arrivers). We further demonstrate that observers’ perceptions of the group shift in the direction of moderate outliers. This occurs because observers anchor on the outlier’s behavior and adjust their recollections of non-outlying individuals, making their inferences about the group’s average behavior more extreme.

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Framing effects on foreign policy: experimental evidence from emerging countries and the Argentine-Brazilian rivalry

Opinião Pública ◽

10.1590/1807-01912016221195 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 22 (1) ◽

pp. 195-218 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Fernando Mouron ◽

Francisco Urdinez ◽

Janina Onuki

Keyword(s):

Economic Growth ◽

Foreign Policy ◽

Public Opinion ◽

Civil Society ◽

Experimental Evidence ◽

Buenos Aires ◽

Framing Effects ◽

Emerging Countries ◽

Foreign Affairs ◽

Survey Experiment

Abstract Civil society plays an increasingly important role in the formulation of foreign policy in emerging countries. This article investigates whether public opinion is sensitive to framing effects regarding foreign policy. Data from a survey experiment with a sample of 1,530 students at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Universidad Nacional de Avellaneda, we find that participants are sensitive to framing effects on foreign affairs. The interviewees changed their preferences when stimulated by information regarding Brazilian economic growth and military expenditure in comparison with Argentina. In turn, this effect was more pronounced among a) people who tend to stay less informed regarding foreign affairs and b) individuals who are more nationalistic.

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