Effects of Mass Media

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James gets in trouble at school for trying to kickbox his classmates as he sees characters do in his video games. Abigail watches a lot of televised high school dramas and worries that appearing too “smart” will make the boys not like her. Are media messages influencing the attitudes and behaviors of these kids? We have already seen how audiences and other factors shape media messages. In this section, we will explore the research and theories on how mass media messages might actually shape us.

In the early years of mass media research (from about the 1920s to the 1940s), audiences were thought to be extremely vulnerable to media messages. Given the effective political impact of propaganda during the First World War and the rise of Nazism, it was believed that media effects were powerful, direct, and uniform and that audiences had no ability to resist them. But empirical research on media effects simply did not support the idea that mass media could have total control of people. So, although this view still exists today in some popular criticism of media, communication researchers have outlined several more empirically supported theories about media effects.