The power of framing: how pro- and anti-conflict media discourses shape attitudes and behaviours towards left-wing extremism in india

Humans assess media discourses on violent political conflicts to either endorse or oppose it. In the largest democracy, India, media significantly depicts the Left-wing extremism (LWE aka Naxalism) with a rejectionist stance to uphold national security and developmental democracy. Nevertheless, no experimental research on perceptual mechanisms regarding pro- or anti-Naxal discourse exists in social and political psychology. This study investigates how people perceive and process anti-Naxal discourse at cognitive and behavioural levels. To explore this, two priming experiments measured the response accuracy (%) and response time (msc) in context of anti- and pro-Naxal discursive stimuli. Findings indicated that anti-extremist discourses were processed with greater speed and higher accuracy than pro-extremist sentential stimuli. Participants showed strong disagreement with pro-Naxal discourses and agreement with anti-Naxal stimuli. The delayed response time for pro-Naxal discourses suggest that participants actively reject the violent ideology of the radical communists. These findings were contextualized within the attentional paradigm, peace journalism, and theories of positive psychology.