scholarly journals How Media Portrayals of Suffering Influence Willingness to Help

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Kogen ◽  
Susanna Dilliplane

Abstract. When we hear stories of distant humanitarian crises, we often feel sympathy for victims, but may stop short of taking action to help. Past research indicates that media portrayals of distant suffering can promote helping behavior by eliciting sympathy, while those that prompt a more rational response tend to decrease helping behavior by undermining sympathy. The authors used an online experiment to test whether certain media frames could promote helping behavior through a more rational, rather than emotional, pathway. The study tested whether framing distant suffering as either solvable or unsolvable might promote helping behavior if a rational evaluation of a crisis leads one to determine that help is efficacious in solving the problem. Survey respondents were randomly assigned to read one of three messages: a high solvability message, a low solvability message, or a control message. Contrary to expectations, both low solvability and high solvability conditions increased participants’ intentions to help. The results suggest that this is because framing problems as unsolvable drives up sympathy, thus promoting willingness to help, while framing problems as solvable drives up perceived efficacy, also promoting willingness to help. The authors conclude that, in contrast to earlier studies, and to the assumptions of many of those working in media, emphasizing rationality can promote helping behavior if audiences rationally interpret the problem as solvable. Implications of the findings for ethically portraying distant suffering in the media are discussed.

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Philipp Heinisch ◽  
Philipp Cimiano

Abstract Within the field of argument mining, an important task consists in predicting the frame of an argument, that is, making explicit the aspects of a controversial discussion that the argument emphasizes and which narrative it constructs. Many approaches so far have adopted the framing classification proposed by Boydstun et al. [3], consisting of 15 categories that have been mainly designed to capture frames in media coverage of political articles. In addition to being quite coarse-grained, these categories are limited in terms of their coverage of the breadth of discussion topics that people debate. Other approaches have proposed to rely on issue-specific and subjective (argumentation) frames indicated by users via labels in debating portals. These labels are overly specific and do often not generalize across topics. We present an approach to bridge between coarse-grained and issue-specific inventories for classifying argumentation frames and propose a supervised approach to classifying frames of arguments at a variable level of granularity by clustering issue-specific, user-provided labels into frame clusters and predicting the frame cluster that an argument evokes. We demonstrate how the approach supports the prediction of frames for varying numbers of clusters. We combine the two tasks, frame prediction with respect to media frames categories as well as prediction of clusters of user-provided labels, in a multi-task setting, learning a classifier that performs the two tasks. As main result, we show that this multi-task setting improves the classification on the single tasks, the media frames classification by up to +9.9 % accuracy and the cluster prediction by up to +8 % accuracy.


2017 ◽  
Vol 233 ◽  
pp. 111-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Jaros ◽  
Jennifer Pan

AbstractXi Jinping's rise to power in late 2012 brought immediate political realignments in China, but the extent of these shifts has remained unclear. In this paper, we evaluate whether the perceived changes associated with Xi Jinping's ascent – increased personalization of power, centralization of authority, Party dominance and anti-Western sentiment – were reflected in the content of provincial-level official media. As past research makes clear, media in China have strong signalling functions, and media coverage patterns can reveal which actors are up and down in politics. Applying innovations in automated text analysis to nearly two million newspaper articles published between 2011 and 2014, we identify and tabulate the individuals and organizations appearing in official media coverage in order to help characterize political shifts in the early years of Xi Jinping's leadership. We find substantively mixed and regionally varied trends in the media coverage of political actors, qualifying the prevailing picture of China's “new normal.” Provincial media coverage reflects increases in the personalization and centralization of political authority, but we find a drop in the media profile of Party organizations and see uneven declines in the media profile of foreign actors. More generally, we highlight marked variation across provinces in coverage trends.


2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirjam Vossen ◽  
Lau Schulpen

Abstract This study investigates the relationship between media frames and public perceptions of global poverty. Building on a frame analysis, the paper reconstructs prevailing poverty narratives in British news articles and non-governmental organizations’ (NGO’s) advertisements between 2011 and 2013. Following this, these narratives are compared with the narratives that emerge from public opinion studies. The findings suggest that there is a strong connection between media frames and public knowledge and perceptions of global poverty. Both the media and the public define poverty in developing countries’ terms of destitute victims, lack of development and bad governance. Both suggest that the causes of poverty are internal to developing countries and imply that there has been little progress in reducing global poverty.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-62
Author(s):  
Istikomah Istikomah

Lack of student interest in learning mathematics is a scourge that needs immediate action. In this study, researchers used the media geoboard and rubber bands as a tool to increase interest in learning. The study was conducted with Classroom Action Research which was successfully completed in two cycles. The results of this study are increased student interest in mathematics before taking action only 12 students, after cycles I and II, made 20 students interested in a total of 22 students. Increasing learning outcomes and concept understanding was very good. At the end of the action in the second cycle it was found that all students had understood the concept of calculating area and circumference of rectangular and triangular shapes.


Author(s):  
Jennifer Ellis

Representations of war in the media have changed drastically over time. Like the media representations of war, the American public's view of wars has also shifted over time; this is often a result of the media portrayals of war events. This paper examines the role of newspaper, yellow journalism, and sensationalism writing during the Spanish-American War on the American public's support for the war and juxtaposes this with television media accounts of the American war in Vietnam and how this created public disapproval for the war. Both had everlasting effects on US war policy for the future.


2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-251
Author(s):  
Daisy Jauregui ◽  
Nataria T. Joseph ◽  
Elizabeth J. Krumrei-Mancuso

The current study examined the immediate impact of exposure to anti-immigration sentiments on the psychological well-being of Latinx young adults. A quasiexperimental, mixed-factorial design was used to analyze differences in mood, stress, ethnic identification, and motivation to take action after exposure to a video stressor across four groups: immigrants from Latin America, first-generation Latinx Americans, second-generation and up Latinx Americans, and non-Latinx, nonimmigrant, White Americans. Three hundred forty participants, ages 18–30, were randomly assigned to either an experimental condition involving an anti-immigration video or a control condition involving a multivitamin video. As hypothesized, those who viewed the anti-immigration video exhibited significantly higher levels of negative affect (p < .001; ηp2 =.06), stress (p < .001; ηp2 =.04), and motivation to take action (p < .001; ηp2 =.07) than those who viewed the multivitamin video. Additionally, Ethnicity/Generation American was associated with higher negative affect (p < .001, ηp2 =.06), stress (p = .01, ηp2 =.04), and motivation to take action (p < .001, ηp2 =.10) after video viewings, such that immigrants from Latin American countries and first-generation Latinx Americans tended to have greater levels than the other groups (pairwise comparison ps < .05). Contrary to our hypothesis, results indicated that firstgeneration Latinx Americans (p = .01) and non-Latinx, nonimmigrant participants (p < .001) experienced a significant decrease in ethnic identification after viewing the anti-immigration video. Our results indicate that, across the differing Ethnicities/Generations American, participants are impacted by anti-immigration sentiments in the media.


2003 ◽  
pp. 179-188
Author(s):  
Jim Coe ◽  
Henry Smith
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Marina Dekavalla

Chapter 6 attempts to explain the prominence of these frames in the media coverage, based on insights from interviews with broadcasters and their sources. It proposes five factors which played a role in shaping media frames: the influence of political campaigns, professional routines relating to balance, journalists’ views of their own role in the coverage of a contested issue, broadcasters’ perceptions of what attracts audiences and what constitutes a contribution to public debate, as well as previous experience of covering election campaigns. The discussion is contextualized within broader academic literature about frame building.


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