Beyond Cultivation: Exploring the Effects of Frequency,Recency, and Vivid Autobiographical Memories for Violent Media

Using Shrum's (1996) heuristic processing model as an explanatory mechanism, we propose that people who hold vivid autobiographical memories for a specific past experience with media violence will overstate the prevalence of real-world crime versus individuals without vivid memories. We also explore the effects of frequency and recency on social reality beliefs. A survey was administered to 207 undergraduate students who were asked to recall one violent television program or movie seen in the past. Participants were asked to write essays describing the violence, which were coded for vividness. Results support not only cultivation theory, but also the effects of memory vividness: participants with more vivid memories of blood and gore gave higher prevalence estimates of real-world crime and violence than participants with less vivid memories. Findings also suggest that females had more vivid memories for prior media violence than males. Implications for cultivation, the heuristic processing model, and vividness research are discussed.     

The Role of Source Confusion in Cultivation Effects May Depend on Processing Strategy A Comment on Mares (1996)

Mares (1996) presented evidence that source confusions play a role in the cultivation effect. In doing so, she suggested that these findings are at odds with assertions made by Shrum and O'Guinn (1993) concerning the lack of attention that people pay to source characteristics when constructing their social reality judgments. The purpose of this comment is to clarify some of the findings of Mares (1996) that have implications for the heuristic model of cultivation effects (Shrum, 1995) and to show that Mares's findings are, in fact, fully compatible with, and can be integrated into, the heuristic processing model. Implications of Mares's findings for refining and extending Ms model are also discussed.     

Always on My Mind: Exploring How Frequent,Recent, and Vivid Television Portrayals Are Used in the Formation of Social Reality Judgments

Prior research has found consistent support for the heuristic processing model of cultivation effects, which argues that cultivation effects can be explained by the availability heuristic. The present study represents an experimental test of the heuristic processing model and tests the impact of frequency, recency, and vividness on construct accessibility and social reality beliefs. 213 students participated in a 2 × 2 × 2 prolonged exposure experimental design varying the frequency of exposure to violent television programs, the level of vividness in the programs, and recency of exposure. Dependent measures were accessibility and social reality beliefs. Results showed that reaction times were largely unresponsive to the independent variables. Although there were no main effects for frequency on social reality beliefs, there was a significant interaction between frequency and vividness on beliefs: People watching vivid violent media gave higher estimates of the prevalence of crime and police immorality in the real world in the 3× viewing condition than those in the 1× viewing condition. In concluding, it is argued that this study has important implications for the heuristic processing model, cultivation theory, and research into vividness effects.     

Local News Media Cultivation of Host Receptivity in Plainstown

This message‐system and cultivation analysis investigated the influence of local news on the host receptivity of native‐born “Plainstown” residents toward immigrants. The message‐system analysis revealed that regional television and newspaper immigration coverage was more pessimistic, while local newspaper immigration coverage was more optimistic. A cultivation analysis confirmed that attention to pessimistic coverage interacted with conversations about immigration to reduce host receptivity. This research contributes to the study of cross‐cultural adaptation by constructing and validating a measure of Y. Y. Kim's (2001) concept of host receptivity. By demonstrating that second‐order cultivation is the product of on‐line cognitive processes, this research provided additional validation of Shrum's (2004) online model of second‐order cultivation. Findings suggest that optimistic immigration news frames may facilitate host receptivity.     

Psychological Processes in Perceiving Reality

Little attention has been paid to the mental processes and the story elements that influence perceived reality judgments of media stories. People often lack the motivation or ability to be thoughtful about perceived reality judgments. This is particularly true when the stimulus controls the pace of the story (e.g., television). It is possible that people use the typical and atypical elements of a story as a heuristic for making simple judgments about perceived reality of media narratives. In 2 studies, the careful manipulation of atypical and typical information in a soap opera and a news story predicted about half the variance in perceived reality. As the typicality of the stories increased, so did the participants' ratings of the perceived reality of the stories. In a 3rd study, while viewing entertainment television shows, participants used dials to continuously rate the selected programs for perceived reality, typicality, interest, and liking. Results indicate that viewers can make moment-to-moment reality judgments, and these judgments are strongly related to typicality. Interest-liking was related to typicality and perceived reality for drama. For comedy, however, situations with low reality produced greater interest and liking. Typicality appears to be a key psychological characteristic of media stories.     

German Abstract

The magnitude of the cultivation effect for perceptual estimates of social reality has been shown to be affected by a number of contextual factors such as source priming and motivation to process information during judgment construction, and these contextual factors have been linked to the use of heuristic processing strategies when constructing judgments of frequency and probability ( L. J. Shrum, in press ). An experiment that manipulated data collection method explored the implications of these findings. A random sample of general population respondents were randomly assigned to either telephone or mail survey conditions. Because telephone surveys generally result in greater heuristic processing than mail surveys, telephone surveys were expected to produce larger cultivation effects than mail surveys. Results showed that not only were the magnitude of the estimates of affluence, crime, vice, marital discord, and occupations generally greater in the telephone than in the mail survey but the correlation of the estimates with amount of viewing was also greater in the telephone than in the mail survey. The implications for measuring the cultivation effect are discussed.     

An Online Process Model of Second‐Order Cultivation Effects: How Television Cultivates Materialism and Its Consequences for Life Satisfaction

Two studies investigated the interrelations among television viewing, materialism, and life satisfaction, and their underlying processes. Study 1 tested an online process model for television's cultivation of materialism by manipulating level of materialistic content. Viewing level influenced materialism, but only among participants who reported being transported by the narrative, supporting a process model in which cultivation effects for value judgments occur online during viewing. Study 2 further investigated television's cultivation of materialism and its consequences for life satisfaction. A survey of U.S. respondents found cultivation effects for materialism and life satisfaction, and materialism mediated the cultivation effect for life satisfaction, suggesting that television's specific cultivation of materialism (proximal effect) mediates a more general cultivation effect for life satisfaction (distal effect).     

Processing strategy moderates the cultivation effect

This study tested the hypothesis that processing strategy moderates the effect of television viewing on social perceptions (cultivation effect). One hundred twenty‐two male and female students provided estimates of the prevalence of crime, occupations, affluence, and marital discord under one of three conditions. Some participants were induced to process heuristically (heuristic group) through instructions to provide their estimates spontaneously with little elaboration. Other participants were induced to process systematically (systematic group) through an accuracy motivation/task importance manipulation. A third (control) group received instructions to simply answer the questions. The results indicated that processing strategy moderated the cultivation effect such that cultivation effects were noted in the heuristic and control groups but not in the systematic group. These results are consistent with the notion that the cultivation effect can be explained in part as the result of heuristic processing through lack of source discounting, and they provide support for the heuristic processing model of cultivation effects.     

Searching for Cognitive Processes in the Cultivation Effect Adult and Adolescent Samples in the United States and Australia

Research on the cultivation hypothesis has focused on whether relationships between television viewing and social reality beliefs truly exist or are artifacts. There is very little evidence about what cognitive processes allow viewers to construct television-biased beliefs. The present study tests two possible processes: First, that perceptions of the television world serve as an intermediate step between fragmented incidental learning from television and beliefs about the real world and second, that beliefs closely linked to television content are an intermediate step in implying more general values and beliefs. These two hypotheses were tested in one adult and three adolescent samples, two in the United States and two in Australia. Across a range of cultivation questions, the basic cultivation result generally replicated that heavy viewers had beliefs about the world that appeared influenced by television. However, neither process hypothesis was supported. Although the null findings on the first hypothesis do not rule out construction from learned fragments, findings on the second hypothesis contradict cultivation's second-order effect. “Close” beliefs and their implied counterparts were unrelated, and cultivation relationships for these implied variables occurred only for those with real-world biased “dose” beliefs. Exploration of this result demonstrated that cultivation of both kinds of beliefs occurred more of ten for adolescents with high academic skills, suggesting that if cultivation occurs, it is a more active and intellectually demanding process than previously proposed.     

Exploring Message Framing Outcomes When Systematic,Heuristic, or Both Types of Processing Occur

Mixed findings have emerged in message framing studies, even when such studies employ the same general type of framing, such as goal framing. This article attempts to show that by extending the heuristic–systematic model‐based explanation of message framing effects to incorporate conditions that may prompt both systematic and heuristic processing, this theory may accommodate some of the aberrant findings. The research reported shows that by varying a message issue's risky implications and its personal relevance, 2 factors that potentially influence the type of processing people employ, systematic, heuristic, or concurrently both types of processing were evoked and influenced people's judgments, causing alternative patterns of message framing effects to occur. The results offer insight into how each of these types of processing can affect message framing outcomes, and they imply that certain seemingly aberrant findings in the literature can be reconciled with this extended theory.     

The Role of Source Confusions in Television's Cultivation of Social Reality Judgments

The chief hypothesis of this study was that errors in memory (specifically source confusions) contribute to the link between television viewing and social reality judgments. Fiction-to-news confusions (fictional programming remembered as news) were hypothesized to positively predict TV-biased judgments of reality. News-to-fiction confusions (news remembered as fiction) were hypothesized to negatively predict such judgments. The results of an experiment in which subjects watched television programming containing both news and fiction indicated that these hypotheses were supported. Levels of confusion interacted with daily television viewing and with the level of certainty attached to the confusions. A manipulation of the visual similarity of the news and fiction content affected subjects'tendency to make source confusions.     

Effects of Testimonial Inconsistencies and Witness Group Identity on Mock‐Juror Judgments1

We examined the interaction of testimonial consistency and witness group identity on mock jurors' judgments of witness effectiveness, probability that the defendant committed the crime, and verdict. In a 3 × 2 (Witness Group Identity × Testimonial Consistency) between‐groups design, 180 mock jurors heard a trial of a person charged with assault. Although both variables affected judgments, group‐identity effects were weak when testimony was characterized by inconsistencies, and they were stronger when testimony was internally consistent but ambiguous. The judgment patterns were consistent with predictions from Chaiken, Liberman, and Eagly's (1989) heuristic‐systematic processing theory, suggesting that heuristic processing would bias systematic processing when the evidence was not decisive.     

Television Viewing and Public Perceptions of Attorneys

This investigation examines the way prime-time network television programming depicts attorneys, and the influence of these images on the public's perceptions of attorneys. In addition, the study examines some of the theoretical and methodological controversies identified with the cultivation explanation of the way television shapes perceptions of social reality. The results reveal that network prime-time television programming depictions of attorneys affect public perceptions of attorneys, particularly in terms of front region behaviors. The results involving attorneys’back region behaviors are mixed. In addition, the results indicate that content-specific viewing is a more reliable predictor than total viewing or select viewer sociodemographic variables of the public's tendency to perceive attorneys in the same way they are portrayed in prime-time television programming.     

The Role of Social Context During Television Viewing on Children’s Moral Judgments About Social Exclusion and Stigmatization of Others

Research has considered how exposure to prosocial television narratives influences children’s social inclusion behaviors (e.g., Mares & Acosta, 2010). In these experiments, children typically view a stimulus episode alone; however, we know that children often watch with others at home (Chandler, 1997). Thus, in this study we examined how children’s proximal social context during viewing influenced effects. Using data collected from a 3-condition experiment (control, view-alone, coview with close friend) with Dutch children ages 5 and 6 (N = 80), we found that exposure largely did not influence children’s inclusion judgments or stigmatization beliefs. There was, however, an age × condition interaction, such that 6-year-old children in the coview condition demonstrated greater stigmatization beliefs toward other children, compared to 5-year-olds in the same condition, or all children in the other conditions. We discuss the implications of these findings while considering previous work on learning inclusion from prosocial television shows, reality judgments, and the bystander effect.     

Fluent, fast, and frugal? A formal model evaluation of the interplay between memory, fluency, and comparative judgments

A new process model of the interplay between memory and judgment processes was recently suggested, assuming that retrieval fluency-that is, the speed with which objects are recognized-will determine inferences concerning such objects in a single-cue fashion. This aspect of the fluency heuristic, an extension of the recognition heuristic, has remained largely untested due to methodological difficulties. To overcome the latter, we propose a measurement model from the class of multinomial processing tree models that can estimate true single-cue reliance on recognition and retrieval fluency. We applied this model to aggregate and individual data from a probabilistic inference experiment and considered both goodness of fit and model complexity to evaluate different hypotheses. The results were relatively clear-cut, revealing that the fluency heuristic is an unlikely candidate for describing comparative judgments concerning recognized objects. These findings are discussed in light of a broader theoretical view on the interplay of memory and judgment processes.     

Mainstreaming,resonance, and impersonal impact.

People may use information from a variety of sources in constructing their judgments of crime risk, including direct experience, word‐of‐mouth, and the mass media. One hundred fifty‐eight general population respondents provided 3 estimates of risk of violent crime: societal crime risk, personal crime risk to themselves in their own neighborhood, and personal crime risk to themselves in New York City. Respondents' level of television viewing was related to their estimates of societal crime risk and to their estimates of personal crime risk in New York City (p < .05) but not to their estimates of personal crime risk in their own neighbourhood (p < .05): all 3 risk estimates were related to respondents' level of television viewing only for those with high direct experience with crime, results that are consistent with Gerbner's concept of resonance (Gerbner et al., 1980). The implications for the concept of impersonal impact (Tyler, 1980) and Gerbner et al.'s concepts of cultivation and mainstreaming are also discussed.     

UNIFORM MESSAGES AND HABITUAL VIEWING: UNNECESSARY ASSUMPTIONS IN SOCIAL REALITY EFFECTS

Gerbner and his co-authors argue that commercial television content is essentially uniform in its symbolic messages about societal values and that television viewing is essentially habitual (ritual) rather than selective. Their claim that these two assumptions are essential to cultivation analysis is challenged here. Viewing crime-adventure, cartoon, and game programs is related to two violence-related social reality beliefs, while viewing of other content types is not. And based on the intercorrelations of viewing various content types, it seems that some types of content are viewed more or less habitually. Finally, an indicator of selecting to view or not view a given content type—watching more or less of that type than predicted based on the individual's total viewing—is quite differently related to social reality beliefs than is viewing itself. This provides support for considering cultivation effects as actual effects rather than the product of third variables or of reverse causation. Overall, then, the uniform message and ritual viewing assumptions are found flawed, but discarding them serves to strengthen rather than weaken the cultivation hypothesis.     

Television Exposure and Children's Decoding of Nonverbal Behavior1

Two studies considered the way in which the magnitude of exposure to television relates to children's understanding and interpretation of others' nonverbal behavior. In the first study, 6th graders made judgments regarding other children whose nonverbal facial behavior did not match their internal emotional state. Results showed that heavier television viewers held a less differentiated, more simplistic view of the consequences of nonverbal self-presentation strategies. In the second study, children in Grades 2 through 6 made judgments of others' nonverbal expressions of emotion. As predicted, heavier television viewers were better at decoding others' nonverbal expressions than lighter viewers, presumably because of their greater exposure to nonverbal displays of emotion on television. In addition, nonverbal decoding skills improved with age.     

Parsing Reality: The Interactive Effects of Complex Syntax and Time Pressure on Cognitive Processing of Television Scenarios

In a variety of domains, complexity has been shown to be an important factor affecting cognitive processing. Complex syntax is 1 of the ways in which complexity has been shown to burden cognitive processing. Research has also shown that the determination of a message's truth, or reality, is affected by message complexity. Cognitive burden has been shown to cause unrealistic events to be judged as more real. Two experiments investigate the effects of syntactic complexity on the typicality assessment of previously rated typical and atypical television scenarios. Complex syntax exhibited a curvilinear effect on reality assessment, such that highly typical events became more unreal and highly atypical events became more real, whereas moderately typical scenarios were unaffected. The cognitive load added by complex syntax appeared to limit the processing of both reality and unreality cues. Adding time pressure was expected to increase cognitive load; however, it appeared to reverse the effects of complex syntax. Participants' syntax recognition results suggested that the complex syntax did burden processing as predicted. Tests with response latencies indicated that atypical scenarios and scenarios described with complex syntax were more slowly recognized.     

A Capacity Model of Children's Comprehension of Educational Content on Television

Many studies have shown that children of various ages learn from educational television, but they have not explained how children extract and comprehend educational content from these television programs. This paper proposes a model (the capacity model) that focuses on children's allocation of working memory resources while watching television. The model consists of a theoretical construct with three basic components (processing of narrative, processing of educational content, and distance, that is, the degree to which the educational content is integral or tangential to the narrative), plus several governing principles that determine the allocation of resources between narrative and educational content. A review of empirical research points to characteristics of both television programs and viewers that affect the allocation of resources under the model, as well as developmental influences on the relevant processing. Finally, implications for the production of effective educational television are discussed.