Some of the 81 volunteers were instructed to read a longer version of the “soccer hooligan” story, while others read a shorter version — and the control group read a rather boring story in which Meier does nothing stupid. Then researchers gave the volunteers a multiple choice general knowledge test, including questions like, “What is the capital of Libya?” and “What kind of speed is expressed by the letter ‘c’ in physics?” and “Who painted La Guernica?”
To be fair, these are tough questions to answer sans-Internet regardless of whether you’ve just watched something vapid like “Toddlers and Tiaras.” But, as the researchers write, “participants who read a narrative about a stupidly acting soccer hooligan performed worse in the knowledge test than participants who read a narrative about a character with no reference to his intellectual abilities.
“The present study is, to our knowledge, the first to show media priming effects of story characters on cognitive performance,” they explain in the report, which was published online this month in the journal Media Psychology.
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