Page 130 - The Social Animal

112 The Social Animal

greed. Television emphasizes criminals’ personal responsibility for
their actions and largely ignores situational pressures correlated with
crime, such as poverty and unemployment.This portrayal has impor-
tant social consequences. People who watch a lot of television come
to adopt this belief system, which affects their expectations and can
cause them to take a hard-line stance when serving on juries. Heavy
viewers are likely to reverse the presumption of innocence, believing
that defendants must be guilty of something; otherwise, they would-
n’t have been brought to trial. 79
It has also been shown that the incidence of larceny (theft) in-
80
creases when television is introduced into an area. Why should this
be the case? The most reasonable explanation is that television pro-
motes the consumption of goods through advertisements; it also de-
picts upper- and middle-class lifestyles as the norm. This illusion of
widespread wealth and consumption may frustrate and anger de-
prived viewers who compare their lifestyles with those portrayed on
television, thereby motivating them to “share in the American
dream” any way they can.
It is nearly impossible to specify the precise extent to which ex-
posure to the media influences public opinion and behavior. Too
many other factors are involved. Because the research described
above is not experimental, it is difficult to separate the effects of
mass communications from the impact of personal experiences and
contact with family and friends. But experiments can be done. For
example, let’s suppose that, as the network executive, you went
ahead with your original plan to televise the documentary on na-
tional health care. In this instance, it would be relatively easy for
you to determine whether your message was persuasive. At the
most basic level, both before and after the telecast, you could poll
cross-sections of viewers about their opinions concerning national
health insurance. If they changed in a favorable direction, you
might conclude your program was effective. If you were interested
in maximizing its effectiveness, you might tape several versions of
the documentary to test different speakers, arguments, and styles of
presentation. If you presented these versions to various test audi-
ences, you could compare the effects of different combinations of
factors. Indeed, this scenario approximates the way most of the re-
search described earlier in this chapter was carried out. Communi-
cations about a variety of topics were prepared. Certain aspects of