There are indeed indications that the current generation has more self-esteem, is more self-aware, and is more narcissistic than previous generations.33 The differences found between generations are often modest, however. Moreover, cross-sectional studies comparing the scores on personality tests of older and younger generations often have difficulty disentangling generational effects from age effects: older people’s norms about the appropriateness of disclosing aspects of themselves might, for example, differ from those of younger people, or they might see themselves or the world differently from the way that younger people do, and thus also respond differently to personality tests.
What the research statistics cannot demonstrate is whether the differences found between generations are good or bad. We may legitimately wonder whether a small amount of narcissism might be functional or adaptive. Self-confidence, self-awareness, and a healthy measure of narcissism are important for success in many professions, including the arts and sciences. Society itself has also greatly changed. What we used to consider bragging is now common practice (for example, the “selfie” culture on social media). And it is precisely the emergence of social media that has led many scholars to blame it for this increase in self-esteem, self-awareness, and narcissism. Whether this blame is justified is discussed in chapter 13.
Psychosocial Problems
Although self-esteem, self-awareness, and narcissism are most frequently mentioned in discussions of generation shifts, the literature on psychosocial problems points out that depression and behavioral problems such as ADHD and anxiety are occurring more frequently than before.34 Interestingly, however, the data indicate that it is not that these problems per se are occurring more frequently—instead, what has often increased is the number of children being treated for depression or other psychosocial problems.35 Indeed, if anything has changed, it seems that criteria for diagnosis have been broadened.36
As with other psychosocial changes, many people have questioned what the role of the media environment might be in the rise of these health problems. For example, about thirty studies have investigated whether the use of fearful media enhances anxiety,37 and nearly fifty studies have examined whether there is a link between media use (television, films, games) and ADHD symptoms.38 Together, these studies have yielded small but significant effects of media use on anxiety and ADHD symptoms. The small size of these effects is due to the great individual differences in children’s susceptibility to the effects of media as a source of anxiety and ADHD symptoms. As is shown in the following chapters, although most children are not extremely susceptible to the effects of media, a minority of them are, and these children deserve our full attention.
Conclusion
So what is the truth? Have children changed over time? Yes, research partly confirms what many people already know: children have indeed changed. Youth today are more intelligent and self-aware than their ancestors, and they have more self-confidence. It is also important to see nuances in these developments. Reports that young people are happy or are doing well, as well as reports emphasizing the numbers of problem youth, can easily overlook individual differences. This caveat applies also to the many “generation books” stating that the new generation is narcissistic, or that the new generation is particularly media savvy because they are digital natives. It often turns out that the differences between generations are much smaller than those within a generation.
It should be clear from this chapter that just as youth have changed physically, cognitively, and psychosocially over time, views of childhood have also dramatically changed. Because of the emergence of television, rapid technological changes, and commercialism, there is no longer a dominant view of children and adolescents. Instead, various views can be placed on a scale between two extremes: the paradigm of the vulnerable child and that of the empowered child. In the paradigm of the vulnerable child, children are seen as passive, vulnerable, and innocent beings who must be protected from the evil coming their way (including the media). Diametrically opposed to this view is the paradigm of the empowered child—the child who has a strong need for autonomy and is able and ready to handle life’s stresses. These views, and those lying along the scale, represent the paradox of childhood today—that is, the view that children need protection and yet their autonomy must simultaneously be supported. This paradox, while complicated, highlights the idea that childhood is not just a developmental phase of life, but also a social construction influenced by historical, social, and economic factors.
3
THEMES AND THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
For some children, under some conditions, some television is harmful. For other children under the same conditions, or for the same children under other conditions it may be beneficial. For most children, under most conditions, most television is probably neither particularly harmful nor particularly beneficial.
This may seem unduly cautious, or full of weasel words, or, perhaps, academic gobbledygook to cover up something inherently simple. But the topic we are dealing with . . . is not simple. We wish it were. . . . Effects are not that simple.
—Wilbur Schramm, Jack Lyle, and Edwin B. Parker, Television in the Lives of Our Children (1961)
Taken from one of the first studies on the role of media in children’s lives, the chapter epigraph reminds us what we know to be true: not all youth are equally susceptible to the influence of media. Yet despite this truth, the idea that media and technology have large effects on all children and teens often prevails in contemporary discourse. In this chapter, we review media effects theories from the early twentieth century onward. We clarify what we do and do not know about the influence of media on youth. When are media effects large, and when are they small? And what do “small” and “large” effects mean, exactly? And which children and teens are especially susceptible to media effects, and why?
How It All Began
In the 1920s, the prevailing notion was that the mass media had a significant and uniform influence on the public, regardless of age. The mass media—specifically, radio and film—were rapidly gaining in popularity at the time. Radio brought popular music into the home, and that led to considerable concerns among parents and educators. Jazz, the pop music of its day, was thought to be so sexually arousing for men that young women were cautioned not to date a jazz fan without a chaperon, and certainly never to get into a car alone with one.1
There were even more concerns at the time about the possible negative influence of motion pictures on youth. In 1930, approximately 65 percent of the U.S. population attended the cinema weekly.2 Motion pictures gave people, especially youth, a new form of entertainment, which at the time had few rivals.3 While elite families may have had a piano along with a radio and books, for the vast majority, such luxuries were out of reach. Movie theaters offered an affordable and welcome form of entertainment for young people. But parents and educators began to worry about the influence of this affordable entertainment. Were motion pictures affecting young people? And if so, how?
The Hypodermic Needle Perspective
During the heyday of motion pictures, communication theories typically suggested that media effects were immediate, direct, and uniform. These theories, which have retrospectively been coined “hypodermic needle,” “stimulus-response,” or “magic bullet” theories, were not well documented at the time. For example, no one has been able to trace an original reference to an author who coined or developed these theories. Yet they are important because they represent a starting point for research and more solidly conceived theories about the effects of media on audiences. Some researchers continue to use the old hypodermic needle theories as a caricature with which they can compare their own, more advanced theories.
Today, the hypodermic needle perspective is considered naive and obsolete—not least because it clashes with contemporary notions of human nature in which human beings are seen as active explorers who define their behavior and values in interaction with their environment. Still, it is
easy to understand how people in the early twentieth century believed that media had large and universal effects. This belief fit in with general notions of human nature at the time, which were heavily influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin rejected the idea of man as a rational, thinking creature. He believed that human and animal behavior alike were driven by unconscious instincts that evolved over time and were uniform within a species.4
Darwin’s view of humankind resurfaced in the social and behavioral sciences during the early twentieth century, which were then strongly dominated by psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Both schools of thought believe that much of our behavior is determined (that is, beyond our control). Psychoanalysts maintained that human behavior was determined by unconscious instincts and sexual drives formed in infancy and early childhood. Behaviorists saw human behavior as uniform and involuntary reflexes to cues and reinforcers in the environment: the stimulus (in the environment) was followed by the response (the behavior). What happened in between, in the mind, was a “black box,” and irrelevant.
Although the hypodermic needle perspective has come to be widely criticized for its lack of nuance, it received some support in the early twentieth century—suggesting that audiences may well have been more gullible, sensitive, and vulnerable to media influence than those of the present day. For example, during the First and Second World Wars and the interwar period, propaganda rapidly became a fact of modern society, and it led to enormous effects. In fact, growing concern in the United States about the impact of Nazi propaganda led to the establishment of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) in 1937. The purpose of IPA was to educate citizens about the increasing amounts of propaganda and to help them recognize and deal with it. At the time, Adolf Hitler and his minister for propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, had great success with their radio and film propaganda.
Gullible Audiences
People’s experiences with the film industry provided some support for the hypodermic needle perspective. For example, the urban legend goes that a showing of the 1896 silent film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station), in which a life-size train arrives in a station, caused sheer panic among the adult audience. The first time this film was shown, viewers supposedly screamed and ran away in panic, believing that a real train was heading toward them. It is doubtful that the audience actually responded this hysterically.5 What is certain, however, is that the new and unfamiliar technology of cinematography left a deep impression on people. Audiences had not yet learned to read the cinematographic codes of audiovisual media. They were unfamiliar with the language of close-ups, scene changes, fade-outs, and so on. Because they were unable to interpret them properly, misunderstandings easily arose. Such strong audience reactions are unimaginable today.
Interestingly, research conducted in the 1950s supported the idea that inexperienced audiences were more susceptible than their worldly peers to the effects of media. Researchers at the time showed a group of adults in Africa—all of them first-time moviegoers—a film about a plague of insects. The film had several close-up shots of the insects. The viewers were exultant, relieved that they lived in a region safe from such enormous bugs.6 Even today, young viewers who have no or little understanding of cinematographic techniques can easily get frightened when shown close-ups of insects. This same unfamiliarity with visual codes makes it entirely plausible that films scared audiences in the early days of cinema. Media literacy might be both a skill that people acquire throughout their lifetime, and something that is handed down from generation to generation.
Over all, however, whether audiences were in fact more sensitive to media effects in the early twentieth century than they are today is impossible to establish. Researchers could neither confirm nor deny the hypodermic needle perspective, because they lacked the tools to study the effects of media. Quantitative research methods were in their infancy, and statistical methods made their entrance into the social sciences only in the 1930s.7 In fact, the first empirical studies exploring the effects of motion pictures on children and teenagers—the Payne Fund Studies—were not published until 1933.
The Payne Fund Studies
The popularity of motion pictures reached its peak in the late 1920s. The first “talkies” had just been released, signaling a breakthrough in mass communication. Almost every teenager went to the movie theater at least once a week. There they became acquainted with a world far removed from their own reality. The movies depicted handsome, stylishly dressed gangsters driving fast cars, drinking liquor, and lounging in bedrooms with their girlfriends. In the meantime, parents watched their children imitate the clothing, attitudes, and behavior of cinema idols. This Pied Piper effect of the movies began to worry them, and as a result there was a widespread demand for information about the effect of movies on children and adolescents.
This demand led to the Payne Fund project, one of the largest-ever studies on the influence of motion pictures on children and adolescents. Initiated by William Short, director of the Motion Picture Research Council, this project consisted of twelve studies conducted between 1929 and 1933.8 Short was convinced that motion pictures strongly influenced the behavior of youth, and that empirical research was necessary to confirm his view. In 1927, he convinced American philanthropist Frances Payne Bolton to award him a sizable research grant to investigate the influence of motion pictures. He also involved several leading researchers of the day, including the film specialist Edgar Dale, the sociologist Herbert Blumer, and the psychologist Louis Thurstone.
Despite their massive scale, the Payne Fund Studies, as the series came to be called, are infrequently cited in contemporary literature. Yet they offer a wealth of information about young people’s relationship to motion pictures in the 1930s, and many of their findings are still surprisingly relevant. They are now in the public domain, and many are available free of charge (see, for example, the Internet Archive’s Open Library).
Content and Effects of the Motion Pictures
The Payne Fund Studies captured a range of aspects associated with motion pictures, such as the specific content of movies and the effects of this content on youth. In terms of content, for each of the years 1920, 1925, and 1930, Edgar Dale analyzed 500 motion pictures. In an attempt to classify these films, he identified ten major themes: crime, sex, love, comedy, mystery, war, children (about or for), history, travel, and social propaganda. Most movies could be classified under three major themes, referred to by Dale as the “Big Three”: love (30 percent), crime (27 percent), and sex (15 percent).9 It seems that the main themes of motion pictures have not changed much in the past century.
At the same time, Herbert Blumer studied the effects of motion pictures on teenagers by analyzing what they mimicked from films, and how often. He used “motion picture autobiographies” and interviewed teens and emerging adults (ages 12–25) about what in the movies inspired and influenced them. More than a thousand young people from differing backgrounds participated in the study, including reformatory inmates. Blumer found that movie heroes’ clothing and mannerisms were imitated most often. In addition, many respondents drew inspiration from the way film stars kissed and courted each other. Finally, boys—and especially the reformatory inmates—regularly copied the criminal behavior depicted in motion pictures. Below are several excerpts from these autobiographies:
I copy all the collegiate styles from the movies. In ‘Wild Party,’ starring Clara Bow, she wears a kind of sleeveless jumper dress which attracted my attention very much. Nothing could be done about it. My mother had to buy me one just like it.
Female (16) high-school junior
Well, the movies taught me how to live that ‘fast life.’ And how to go on wild parties with men. How to long for clothes and good times. It just made me want to lead the life that I saw in some of the movies. Fast life and easy money. The movies also teach one how to be popular.
Female (19) sexual delinquent
The movies in m
y childhood were the principal cause of my downfall . . . I saw how the bad guy in the movies got money and cops could not catch him. Sometimes I wanted to help the bad guy get away . . . When I saw the movies, I sometimes did just as the bad guy did. Yes, it tempted me to crime and I wanted to be a bold guy and take the part of the bad guy in our games.
Male (22) sentenced for burglary, inmate of reformatory
The sex pictures are ones a lot of us go to, just to get excited. Afterwards we go to a house of prostitution and satisfy our desires.
Male (22) sentenced for robbery, inmate of reformatory10
Still other researchers focused on the effects of film on learning, attitudes, emotions, and behavior, sometimes employing what were then considered unconventional methods. For example, researchers showed children, teenagers, and young adults sad, frightening, and erotic films, both in the laboratory and in movie theaters. They attached their film-watching subjects to equipment that measured their physiological responses. Compared with teenagers and adults, children had stronger physiological responses to almost every category of film except erotic ones. Erotic films led to physiological arousal among children only after they reached ten years of age.11 This study is particularly remarkable when one considers that most empirical research on how children (and adults) process media content did not emerge until the 1970s.
The Hypodermic Needle Perspective Begins to Crack
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