Moderating Effect of Group Cue While Processing News on Immigration: Is the Framing Effect a Heuristic Process?

This paper presents a study on the sociocognitive effects of news frames on immigration. One hundred and eighty‐six individuals were exposed to a newspaper story on increased immigration to Spain. The newspaper highlighted (a) the positive (economic contribution frame) versus negative (crime growth frame) consequences and (b) the group cue—Latinos versus Moroccans. In contrast with economic contribution frame, crime growth frame stimulated more negative cognitive responses toward immigration, increased the salience of immigration as a problem, generated a negative attitude toward immigration, and induced greater disagreement with positive beliefs about the consequences of immigration for the country. We conceptualized the framing effect as a heuristic process in which peripheral cues in the news story guided information processing.