The Half-Life of Identity-Based Priming: Micro-longitudinal Evidence from Crowdfunding and Policy News

This project tracks the time course of priming triggered by exposure to attitude-inconsistent political messages (e.g., a rival candidate’s crowdfunding page) and its spillover to opinions on adjacent, ostensibly non-political topics (e.g., science policy, climate). Using smartphone-based experience sampling and objective exposure logs, we estimate a “half-life” of the prime and test just-in-time mitigation via schema and threat/safety frames. Most work measures priming in one-off lab settings; real-world effects and their decay are under-examined. This research integrates insights from Seimel (2024) and Dey et al. (2022) to model the temporal dynamics of identity priming and the efficacy of counter-framing delivered at different delays (e.g., 15 minutes, 6 hours, 24 hours). Anchored in classic framing/priming theory, it incorporates objective exposure metrics to address selective exposure and realism challenges. Identifying a priming “window” and testing time-sensitive counter-messages provides a practical lever for campaigns, journalists, and platforms to reduce cross-domain spillovers from partisan cues. The impact is a generalizable, time-resolved model of identity-based priming with actionable guidance on when to intervene and which frame to deploy to minimize unintended polarization spillovers.

References:

1. Re-imagining the Power of Priming and Framing Effects in the Context of Political Crowdfunding Campaigns. S. Dey, Brittany R. L. Duff, Karrie Karahalios (2022). International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
2. Political communication in the real world: evidence from a natural experiment in Germany. Armin Seimel (2024). Political Science Research and Methods.