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Between the 1930s and the 1970s, media researchers developed several paradigms about how media affect individuals’ behavior. These models were known as hypodermic needle, minimal effects, and uses and gratifications.

Hypodermic Needle

The notion that powerful media adversely affect weak audiences has been labeled the hypodermic needle (or magic bullet) model. It suggests that the media “shoot” their effects directly into unsuspecting victims.

One of the earliest challenges to this model came from a study of Orson Welles’s legendary October 30, 1938, radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. The broadcast presented H. G. Wells’s Martian-invasion novel in the form of a news report—which frightened millions of listeners who didn’t realize it was fictional. (See Chapter 6.) In 1940, radio researcher Hadley Cantril wrote a book-length study of the broadcast and its aftermath titled The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. Cantril argued that, contrary to what the hypodermic needle model suggested, not all listeners thought the radio program was a real news report. In fact, the relatively few listeners who thought there was an invasion from Mars were those who tuned in late and missed the disclaimer at the beginning of the broadcast, and who were also predisposed (because of religious beliefs) to think that the end of the world was actually near. Although social scientists have since disproved the hypodermic needle model, many people still subscribe to it, particularly when considering the media’s impact on children.

Minimal Effects

Cantril’s research helped lay the groundwork for the minimal effects (or limited effects) model proposed by some media researchers. With the rise of empirical research techniques, social scientists began discovering and demonstrating that media alone do not cause people to change their attitudes and behaviors. After conducting controlled experiments and surveys, researchers argued that people generally engage in selective exposure and selective retention with regard to media. That is, people expose themselves to media messages most familiar to them, and retain messages that confirm values and attitudes they already hold. Minimal effects researchers have argued that in most cases mass media reinforce existing behaviors and attitudes rather than change them.

Indeed, Joseph Klapper, in his 1960 research study, The Effects of Mass Communication, found that mass media influenced only those individuals who did not already hold strong views on an issue. Media, Klapper added, had a greater impact on poor and uneducated audiences. Solidifying the minimal effects argument, Klapper concluded that strong media effects occur largely at an individual level and do not appear to have large-scale, measurable, and direct effects on society as a whole.¹⁰

Uses and Gratifications

The uses and gratifications model arose to challenge the notion that people are passive recipients of media. This model holds that people instead actively engage in using media to satisfy various emotional or intellectual needs; for example, turning on the TV in the house not only to be entertained but also to use it as an “electronic hearth,” making the space feel more warm and alive. Researchers supporting this model use in-depth interviews to supplement survey questionnaires. Through these interviews, they study the ways in which people used the media. Instead of asking, “What effects do media have on us?” these researchers ask, “Why do we use media?”

Although the uses and gratifications model addresses the functions of the mass media for individuals, it does not address important questions related to the impact of the media on society. Consequently, the uses and gratifications model has never become a dominant or enduring paradigm in media research. But the rise of Internet-related media technologies has brought a resurgence in uses and gratifications research to understand why people use new media.