Television Dramas and Support for Controversial Public Policies: Effects and Mechanisms

In this experiment, we examine effects of television dramas on support for controversial public policies (gay marriage and the death penalty) and explore mechanisms that may explain such effects. The dramas influenced support for death penalty but not gay marriage. As predicted, exposure to the relevant drama eliminated the relationship between prior ideology (conceptualized as a continuous variable) and death penalty support. Moreover, the valence of the relationship between prior (increasingly liberal) ideology and salience of a relevant value (perceived importance of a safe and crime-free society) went from negative in the comparison condition to positive after exposure to the relevant drama. These and other results suggest that a television narrative can influence policy support by reframing the dramatic situation to reduce the effect of prior ideology and values and by minimizing processing of the story as intentionally persuasive discourse.