Framing Social Values: An Experimental Study of Culture and Cognition

Abstract

How and why does a given social value come to shape the way an individual thinks, feels,and acts in a specific social situation? This study links ideas from Goffman’s frame analysis to other lines of research, proposing that dramatic narratives of variable content, vividness,and language-in-use produce variation in the accessibility of schematic, internal cultural frameworks, and, thereby, variation in the social value frames that gain situational primacy. Hypotheses derived from the argument are experimentally supported, and results encourage further research on the process of social value framing, which operates as a person crosses oundaries in the complex subcultural mosaic.