Manufacturing Mis/Trust: How Media Framings of Great Power Relations Today Contribute to War and Peace, An Experimental Analysis

This article explores the impact of media framings of great power relations today as positive or negative sum on the prospects for war and peace. In an online experiment (N = 260) using real CNN news video clips, we demonstrate that intergroup affect and trust mediate the causal relationship between exposure to different media framings of US-China relations and the China policy preferences of American viewers. Specifically, zero (vs. positive) sum media framings of US-China relations reduced Americans’ trust in the Chinese people and government, and increased their anger about China’s possible rise; mistrust and anger in turn drove Americans to prefer a tougher China policy. These causal findings demonstrate the psychological mechanisms through which Realist and Power Transitions theories, which popularize a view of great power relations as inherently zero-sum, generate the psychological conditions of mistrust and anger that promote conflict, becoming self-fulfilling. Interventions to promote positive-sum perceptions of mixed-motive social dilemmas and improve the prospects for peace in US-China relations are discussed. This research is particularly timely given the election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States. Trump lives and champions a dog-eat-dog view of the world. Manhattan real estate is a zero-sum game of rent-seeking—not creating wealth and expanding the pie like most other industries, but through crushing “enemies.” Trump’s “deals” are not about cooperation and expanding the pie, but about extracting the biggest piece for himself. If this zero-sum mindset becomes a hallmark of Trump’s foreign policy, our research should shed light on the psychological mechanisms through which a zero-sum view of great power relations, which are actually often mixed-motive social dilemmas, becomes self-fulfilling.