Social mobility or social change? How different groups react to identity-related news

In times of identity politics, journalists use group primes to organize events and reduce their com-plexity. Because research has mostly investigated the effects of single group primes on opinionformation and news selection, two aspects of group primes in the news have remained understud-ied: (1) whether they directly affect group identification itself, and (2) how these effects differbetween groups. This experiment (N=750) shows that group primes in the news cause aware-ness of citizens’membership in these groups. However, citizens’perceived group importancediverges between groups: priming groups that likely have asocial change mindsetincreases theirperceived importance, while priming groups that likely have asocial mobility mindsetdoes not.Accordingly, the effects of group primes in the news depend on shared notions of a group’s statusin society and the rigidity of its boundary. Thesefindings considerably advance contemporaryunderstanding of differential news effects relating to group identification.