Framing effects on fear of terrorism and willingness to sacrifice civil liberties

The purpose of this research was to determine whether differences in the way the media frames an act of violence leads to different reactions by consumers. In particular, it was hypothesized that the ideology and race of the perpetrator would lead to differences in perceptions of whether or not the attack was terrorism. A vignette-style experiment was performed using respondents recruited via MTurk. Four versions of the vignette were evenly distributed to 441 respondents, changing whether the frame contained a photo, the ideology, and the name of the perpetrator. Using measures of fear from this data it was then investigated whether or not fear made respondents more willing to trade their civil liberties for a feeling of increased security. Though few significant findings were discovered in this research, it is believed that the findings will contribute to the broader topic by suggesting new directions for terrorism and media framing research in the future.