Thomas Miller | April 27, 2010
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| Photo by Thomas Miller |
| University of Texas professor Maxwell McCombs talked about his research at the Dogwood Room at the IMU and met with doctoral students to review their work during his visit on campus. |
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Monday, McCombs spoke at the Dogwood Room in the Indiana Memorial Union about the “Psychology of Agenda-Setting Effects.” Agenda setting research analyzes the effects of the media on the general population.
Along with University of North Carolina’s Donald Shaw, who visited the school last month, McCombs published influential papers in the 1960s that formed the basis of modern research on agenda setting.
“He’s one of the founding fathers of our field,” said journalism professor Lars Willnat.
McCombs focused his talk on the psychology of agenda setting, an area he said is largely ignored by academics because of its difficulty to quantify. McCombs said psychologists refer to researching people’s feelings about an issue as a black box, something that can be difficult to analyze effectively.
To tackle this black box topic, McCombs presented research that asked survey participants not only what they thought the most important issues of the day are, but also how they felt about them in several contexts.
“For years we’ve gone around asking, ‘What’s the most important issue to you?’” McCombs said. “But we’ve never asked the journalistic follow up, “Why’d you say that?”
McCombs pointed to a number of studies, including some of his own research, which seeks to answer why people find some issues more important than others. McCombs conducted a study where he asked people to associate their most important issue with a reason. Those reasons ranged from how people felt emotionally to whether or not they thought the issue was in their self-interest or an issue of civic duty. During his study, McCombs was struck by how little self-interest played in determining an issue’s importance in his survey.
“If its true that people vote with their pocket book, then a whole lot of people lied to me,” McCombs said.
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| Photo by Thomas Miller |
| McCombs and Donald Shaw of the University of North Carolina were among the first to study agenda setting, looking at how people are influenced by media. |
Weaver and McComb’s relationship dates back to the early 1970s, when Weaver was a doctoral student at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In 1972, Weaver, along with Shaw and McCombs, published a paper that introduced the concept of “need for orientation,” an idea that explains why people seek out information about certain topics. McCombs, Shaw, and Weaver argued in their 1972 paper that people needed to map out their world and, in situations when people did not know a lot about what was going on, they were more susceptible to media effects.
McCombs described agenda setting as a way of answering fundamental questions about why people find some issues more important than others. McCombs pointed to the simultaneous increase in importance of crime in research surveys and its increased presence in the news during the 1990s.
“They are thinking, ‘this could happen to me,’” McCombs said, explaining why people were so affected by crime stories in their cities.
Throughout his talk, McCombs came back to the idea that agenda-setting research is about figuring out what people carried with them from the media, and research itself must adapt to changing media climate. People today must sift through the flood of information coming at them from online and broadcast sources, often amid a decrease in traditional news outlets. They may be overwhelmed, and in that, may change their habits, leaving more work for agenda-setting research.
McCombs left his audience with a point to ponder.
“What messages do people pick up out of the avalanche?” he asked.
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