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.

Open access funding provided by Manipal University Jaipur. Amity University Jharkhand, Ranchi, India National Institute of Technology Raipur, Raipur, India Manipal University Jaipur, Jaipur, India The authors declare no competing interests. This study received ethical approval from the Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) of Amity University Jharkhand, Ranchi (Approval ID: AUI/05/ACER/IEC/2024-25/04), dated 10 February 2025.

All research activities were conducted in accordance with the ethical standards outlined by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). Written informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to their participation. Participants were briefed about the purpose and procedures of the study and informed of their right to withdraw at any stage.

Participants were assured of anonymity and confidentiality, and all data collected were used solely for academic research purposes. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material.