Page 129 - The Social Animal

Mass Communication, Propaganda, and Persuasion 111

that heavy viewers (1) expressed more racially prejudiced attitudes;
(2) overestimated the number of people employed as physicians,
lawyers, and athletes; (3) perceived women as having more limited
abilities and interests than men; (4) held exaggerated views about the
prevalence of violence. Perhaps most troubling, research continually
shows that the more television you watch the more you see the world
as a sinister place, where people are just looking out for themselves
and would take advantage of you if they had a chance. In other
words, reality to a heavy viewer is like a typical reality show. These
attitudes and beliefs reflect the inaccurate portrayals of American life
provided to us by television.*
Of course, each of us has had extensive personal contact with
many people in myriad social contexts; the media are just one source
of our knowledge about the sexes and about different ethnic or oc-
cupational groups. The information and impressions we receive
through the media are probably less influential when we can also rely
on firsthand experience. Thus, those of us who have been in close
contact with several women in jobs outside of the home are proba-
bly less susceptible to the stereotypes of women portrayed on televi-
sion. On the other hand, while each of us has formed conceptions
about crime and violence, it is unlikely that many of those opinions
developed from our personal experience. For most of us, television is
virtually our only vivid source of information about crime. A major
portion of television programming consists of crime shows—the av-
erage 15-year-old has viewed more than 13,000 television killings.
Moreover, several studies have shown that crime dramas dispense re-
markably consistent images of both the police and criminals. For ex-
ample, on TV, police officers are amazingly effective, solving almost
every crime, and are infallible in one regard: The wrong person is al-
most never in jail at the end of a show. Television fosters an illusion
of certainty in crime fighting. Television criminals generally turn to
crime because of psychopathology or insatiable (and unnecessary)

*It should be noted that Gerbner’s research is correlational, not experimental. It
is therefore impossible to determine whether heavy viewing actually causes prejudiced
attitudes and inaccurate beliefs or whether people already holding such attitudes and
beliefs simply tend to watch more television. To bolster their conclusions, Gerbner
and his associates sampled viewers from all age,education,income and ethnic groups.
After taking such viewer characteristics into account,they found that the relationship
between heavy viewing and inaccurate beliefs still occurred in every category.