Cultivation analysis

1
Cultivation analysis

• Gerbner and companys take on the role of
  television in US culture

2
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

3
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 peoples view of the
  world
• Focused most heavily on violent portrayals

4
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

5
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

6
Mean World Syndrome

• The perception that
• you are in greater danger than you really are
• people cant be trusted
• a much larger part of the populace is involved in
  crime in some way than actually is the case

7
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

8

• 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

9
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

10
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.

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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

12
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

13
Features of TV violence

• Heavy use of violence as a plot device
• Violence is ubiquitouskids 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

14
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

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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).

16
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).

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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.

18
Cultivation differential
19
Factors affecting cultivation

• Cultivation is dependent on and a manifestation
  of the extent to which televisions 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

20
Resonance
21
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 cultures 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

22
Mainstreaming
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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 dont 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

24
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

25
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

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• 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

27
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

28
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

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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