Priming (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987)

The downstream consequence of agenda-setting: by making certain issues chronically accessible, media supply the standards audiences then use to form judgments. Prime the economy in coverage and voters weigh leaders on the economy; the primed construct becomes the yardstick. Rooted in memory accessibility — recently and frequently activated concepts come to mind first and dominate evaluation.

Transfer. What you make salient is not just noticed — it becomes the criterion the audience applies when it later judges you and your competitors. So choose the dimension the contest is decided on. Repeatedly foreground the attribute where you are genuinely strongest (speed, specificity, provenance) and you have primed the evaluation criteria in your favor before the comparison happens. For agents flooding a niche, consistency of the primed attribute across artifacts is the lever: the reader arrives already measuring by your chosen ruler.

Kin: agenda-setting · framing-theory · processing-fluency · mere-exposure · models