Page 128 - The Social Animal

110 The Social Animal

It is precisely because social psychological principles can be made
to work so well that I believe it is essential to understand persuasion
tactics, recognize when they are being used—and to question their
abuse. This is especially true because the sheer volume of television
74
we Americans consume is staggering. The typical household’s tel-
75
evision set is turned on for more than 7 hours a day, and the aver-
age American watches 30 hours of television a week—that’s slightly
more than 1,500 hours a year. The average high-school graduate has
spent much more time with television than interacting with their
parents or with teachers. 76
The medium has impact, and the view of reality it transmits sel-
77
dom remains value-free. George Gerbner and his associates con-
ducted the most extensive analysis of television yet. Since the late
1960s, these researchers have been videotaping and carefully analyz-
ing thousands of prime-time television programs and characters.
Their findings, taken as a whole, suggest that television’s representa-
tion of reality has traditionally misled American viewers. In prime-
time programming in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, males
outnumbered females by almost 3 to 1, and women were depicted as
younger and less experienced than men. Nonwhites (especially Lati-
nos and Asian Americans) and the elderly were vastly underrepre-
sented, and members of minority groups were disproportionately
cast in minor roles. Moreover, most prime-time characters were por-
trayed as professional and managerial workers: although 67 percent
of the workforce in the United States was employed in a blue-collar
or service job, only 25 percent of television characters held such jobs.
Finally, crime—then as now—was at least 10 times as prevalent on
television as in real life; about half of television’s characters are in-
volved in a violent confrontation each week; in reality, less than 1
percent of Americans are victims of criminal violence in any given
year. During the past several years, FBI statistics reveal that the rate
of violent crime has actually been decreasing in this country—but on
TV, violent crime is on the increase. David Rintels, a television writer
and former president of the Writers Guild of America, summed it
up best when he said, “From 8 to 11 o’clock each night, television is
one long lie.” 78
And people believe the lie. Research conducted during this era
compared the attitudes and beliefs of heavy viewers (more than 4
hours a day) and light viewers (less than 2 hours a day). They found