Cultivation analysis

Gerbner and company’s take on the role of television in US culture

Concern over TV violence

• Fear that TV violence has negative effects has been around a long time– Lots of violent programming– Concern over susceptibility of children– Riots of the 60s– Major government funding of research

Main concern for TV violence research

• The fear that exposure to TV violence leads to aggressive or violent behavior is the most common focus of research

• George Gerbner was interested in the effect of televised portrayals on people’s view of the world– Focused most heavily on violent portrayals

Aggression v. cultivation

• Most studies look at the impact of a single or limited set of violent depictions– Laboratory experiments

– Surveys about exposure to single shows, etc.

• The dependent variable is measured immediately or soon after the exposure

• The dependent variable is usually either aggressive thoughts or behaviors

• Significant but limited effects are found

Cultivation

• Gerbner said that single exposures to violent depictions are unlikely to have much impact

• The continuous exposure over long periods of time to a heavy diet of violent depictions is more likely to have powerful effects

• The more important impact of this is the development of a view of the world that sees it as a mean and scary place– Mean World Syndrome

Mean World Syndrome

• The perception that – you are in greater danger than you really are– people can’t be trusted– a much larger part of the populace is involved in

crime in some way than actually is the case

Additional concerns

• Demonstration of the rules of power– Who gets to hurt who?– Who has power?

• Demographics

– Rules of relationships– Representations of groups

• Race, gender, social class

• The same ‘drip drip drip’ that is supposed to make us fearful also may make us classist, bigoted, sexist, and so on

• Because it happens over time, slowly, and widely throughout the culture, it is hard to identify the phenomenon

Change v. stability

• Effects studies look for cognitive or behavioral change– Increased aggressiveness

• Cultivation looks for stability– Lack of change in the face of massive inequality,

unfair treatment of large numbers of people, etc.– Support for existing system, authority, etc.

• There is a perceived need for protection from dangerous groups, etc. who also happen to be those exploited by the current system

Gerbner

“Television has transformed the cultural process of story-telling into a centralized, standardized, market-driven, advertiser-sponsored system. . . . the cultural process of story-telling is now in the hands of global commercial interests who have something to sell, and who in effect operate outside the reach of democratic decision-making.”

Why is this a problem?

• Television as an institution has no conscience– No concern for the audience as people

• Especially egregious when thinking about the most vulnerable members of the audience

– Children

• Driven by market dynamics to provide content that is most likely to hold audience for advertising

– Research shows that this tends not to be most liked, but least objectionable

• US is almost unique in lack of government control over media content

How do Gerbner et al. make their case?

• Cultural Indicators– Content analyses (since 1967) of television

programming “to track the most stable, pervasive, and recurrent images in media content, in terms of the portrayal of violence, minorities, gender-roles, occupations, and so on”

Features of TV violence• Heavy use of violence as a plot device

• Violence is ubiquitous—kids’ cartoons, daytime serials, Prime Time programming; comedy, action-adventure, reality TV

• Shows who can perform violence and who is a victim– Middle-aged white males have the right to engage in

violence

– Women are victims

How do you determine the effect?

• Use surveys to ask how much TV a person watches, how dangerous she thinks the world is (e.g., how likely she is to be attacked if she walks alone at night), whether you can trust people, and so on

• If heavy TV viewers give the ‘TV answer’ then Gerbner et al. conclude that cultivation has occurred– TV answer is determined by projection from Cultural

Indicators findings

Example

• In a survey of about 450 New Jersey schoolchildren, 73 percent of heavy viewers compared to 62 percent of light viewers gave the TV answer to a question asking them to estimate the number of people involved in violence in a typical week.

• Children who were heavy viewers were more fearful about walking alone in a city at night and overestimated the number of people who commit serious crimes

• (Dominick 1990, p. 512).

Another example

• One controlled experiment manipulated the viewing of American college students to create heavy- and light-viewing groups. After 6 weeks of controlled viewing, heavy viewers of action-adventure programmes were indeed found to be more fearful of life in the everyday world than were light viewers

• (Dominick 1990, p. 513).

Third example

• Pingree and Hawkins (1981, cited in Condry 1989, p. 127) studied 1,280 primary schoolchildren (2nd-11th grade) in Australia using viewing diaries and questionnaires.

• Heavy viewing led to a 'television-biased' view of Australia as a 'mean and violent' place. The children with the bleakest picture of Australia were those who most watched American crime adventure programmes. Oddly, they did not judge the USA to the same extent by these programmes.

Cultivation differential

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Percent saying 10% in law enforcement

Light TV viewersHeavy TV viewers

Factors affecting cultivation

• “Cultivation is dependent on and a manifestation of the extent to which television’s imagery dominates viewers’ sources of information.”– Resonance where those who live in high-crime

neighborhoods get a ‘double dose of messages that resonate and amplify cultivation’

– Minorities “whose fictional counterparts are more frequently victimized on television”

Resonance

0102030405060708090

100

Male Female Suburb City

Light TV viewers Heavy TV viewers

Mainstreaming

• Dominant cultural ‘current’ “representing the broadest and most common dimensions of shared meanings”– “Because of its unique role in our society, we see television

as the primary manifestation of our culture’s mainstream.”

• “Mainstreaming means that heavy viewing may absorb or override differences in perspectives and behavior which ordinarily stem from other factors and influences.”– Cultural, social and political characteristics of groups

would otherwise lead to more ideological diversity

Mainstreaming

0102030405060708090

100

Low income Mediumincome

High income White Black

Light TV viewers Heavy TV viewers

Implications

• People lead less satisfying lives than they could– They are more fearful than they ought to be

– They spend money on locks, guard dogs, etc.

– They don’t go out at night, distrust strangers, etc.

• The society becomes more authoritarian than it would otherwise have been– Lock up the dangerous strangers

– Invest in police, prisons

– Elect law-and-order candidates

Cultivation research is very controversial

• Much more questioning of the premise and of the study methods within the scientific community than with social learning theory– Most famous argument between researchers over a

theory that can be found in media studies• Gerbner v. Hirsch

Problems with cultivation research

• No clear psychological process specified that would produce the results of interest– ‘Drip drip drip’ is not a theory– Shrum has tried to provide a more complete

theoretical model

• No clear connection between individual fear and the development of an authoritarian society– Levels of analysis problem

• Many studies have been carried out and a fair number do not find any results or the results disappear after controlling for some other factors

Maybe it is a thing of the past

• New technologies are available that people may use instead of TV– Especially evident among the young

• However,:– people still spend more time with TV than other

media– much new media content is violent

• Reuse of TV content

Problems with the research methods

• Accusations of ‘cherry picking’ high and low TV levels, which indicators of ‘cultivation’ counted, etc.– Lack of control for third variables

• Heavy TV watchers tend to live in dangerous neighborhood

• Low correlations• Limits on survey analyses

– many are secondary data analyses

Strengths of cultivation analysis

• It looks at our beliefs about social reality, so it covers a broad range of social phenomena– Violence

– Prejudice

• It looks at a wide range of content the individual is exposed to rather than a small portion

• It avoids some of the artificiality of lab research

• It does cover multiple levels of analysis