In a time of polarization and identity politics, journalists increasingly use group primes in the news to organize events and reduce their complexity. So far, research has been focused on studying news priming of partisanship, and the effects that has on opinion formation. Consequently, two fundamental aspects of studying identity and the news have remained largely unstudied, namely (1) whether group primes in news media actually also have direct effects on group identification itself, and (2) whether these effects are consistent across different types of group primes. This experiment (N=750) shows that group primes in the news lead to more awareness of one’s membership in the corresponding group. Furthermore, the perceived importance of this group is constructed in a process of social creativity: low-status group members that assume a social change mindset increase identification, while those in a social mobility mindset do not. These findings can help news effects scholars to understand how various groups differ in the extent to which they influence news processing.
