Influences on Attitudes and Behaviors

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Although selectivity may give audiences some power and make them resistant to being influenced by media, there are several areas where media do have more substantial influences on audiences. These include encouraging people to imitate behavior, cultivating cultural attitudes, and setting the political issue agenda.

Social Cognitive Theory. According to social cognitive theory, we learn behavior by watching the behaviors of those whom we have identified as models (Bandura, 2001). We must first attend to the modeled behavior, then remember it, and then have the ability and motivation to imitate it. We are particularly likely to imitate modeled behaviors when we see that the models are rewarded for what they do—when your big brother gets lots of praise for playing the guitar, you then try to play the guitar! How does this apply to media effects? Media provide many modeled behaviors for children and adults to learn from and imitate, both positive (like sharing or giving to charity) and negative (such as acting violently). Decades of experimental studies looking at the effects of television violence on children’s behavior have found that children are more likely to be aggressive after viewing rewarded rather than punished TV violence (see Bushman & Huesmann, 2001, for a review). Most studies are limited to examining short-term effects (behavior right after viewing), so it is unclear whether children would make long-term behavior changes after a one-time viewing experience, especially if they later get in trouble at home or school for being aggressive.

There are several factors besides rewards and punishments that can increase the likelihood of imitating behaviors we witness on television (violent or otherwise). Children are more likely to imitate behavior that is realistic (as opposed to fantasy), justified (the character has a good reason for doing it), and committed by characters the children identify with (the hero). In addition, younger children have more difficulty understanding characters’ motives and distinguishing fantasy from reality and are therefore more likely to be influenced by TV models. The good news is that providing strong, likable, and realistic positive role models for children can promote good behavior.

Cultivation Theory. If you watch a lot of reality TV about cosmetic surgery, are you more likely to believe that plastic surgery is normal and acceptable? George Gerbner’s cultivation theory indeed argues that a steady, long-term diet of heavy television viewing results in perceptions of reality that match the (distorted) view of reality presented on television (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1994). Originally developed in the 1970s, the theory did not distinguish between different kinds of programs; it treated the entire TV world as basically the same—dominated by messages about crime and violence. The theory proposed that the more TV you watch, the more you will develop a perception of the world as a scary, violent place. Studies showed that individuals who watch a lot of television were indeed more likely to be afraid of crime or of walking alone at night, to estimate greater police activity, and to mistrust other people (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1994).

Whether or not media have the ability to cultivate our attitudes about issues, there is evidence that media do have an impact on what issues we think about in the first place.

However, the explosion of television channels, genres, and new media has led to criticism of the idea that all television messages are the same, and research during the past two decades has largely shifted toward looking at correlations between attitudes and heavy viewing of certain types of media messages—young girls who consume a lot of “thin media” messages having poorer body images, for example (Harrison & Cantor, 1997; Tiggeman, 2005). But critics of cultivation theory argue not only that the effects are pretty small but also that it is impossible to determine whether any of the correlations that cultivation studies find are actually media effects (Nabi, 2009). This is because the causal direction could arguably be going the other way: girls who have a poor body image or low self-esteem are likely to seek out messages that confirm their views (that is, by finding thin models to compare themselves to). Similarly, people who are already accepting of plastic surgery are the very people most likely to watch shows about it. Still, it is important to be aware of our media “diet,” as this may well be connected to the kinds of stereotypes, attitudes, and perceptions we are developing or reinforcing.

Agenda Setting. Whether or not media have the ability to cultivate our attitudes about issues, there is evidence that media do have an impact on what issues we think about in the first place. Agenda setting is the idea that extensive media coverage of a particular issue, such as an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or health care reform in Washington, will “set the agenda” for what issues people are thinking and talking about (see McCombs, 2005). Issues that do not get much coverage will not seem very important.

Agenda setting is important because we use the issues we are thinking about to evaluate political leaders and potential policy decisions. For example, when the BP oil spill was getting nonstop cable news coverage in May and June of 2010, people tended to evaluate President Obama based on how they thought he was handling the oil spill (as opposed to how he might have been dealing with other issues). Indeed, when his ratings on leadership and the handling of the crisis dropped, his overall approval ratings also dropped (Allen, 2010). Obama’s decision to ban offshore oil drilling was a huge concern among audiences—applauded by those with long-standing concerns about oil and the environment and heavily criticized by those concerned about the Gulf’s economy. But in either case, the importance of that decision was likely a function of the heavy press scrutiny at the time, along with continuing coverage of the oil pouring into the Gulf. Once the oil leak had been repaired and the news shifted to other topics, the moratorium on oil drilling seemed to also fade from people’s concerns, despite its continuing effects on the Gulf’s economy. As news coverage of oil issues rises or falls in the future, the concern about domestic drilling may resurface or fade as an important political battle.

With a diverse range of media news outlets available online, we might predict that media would no longer provide an agenda but would instead offer differing levels of coverage. But there is evidence that, even on the Internet, audiences still seem to have their agendas influenced. Discussions on electronic bulletin boards, for example, have been found to correspond with the topics that had been covered days beforehand in the mainstream news (Marilyn, Wanta, & Dzwo, 2002).