Plugged In

by Patti M Valkenburg

  What were the main conclusions of the Payne Fund Studies? Given the size and scope of studies, it is difficult to expect unequivocal results from this work. Indeed, each study and resulting report offered its own set of interpretations. The age of the child, for example, emerged as an important factor for predicting susceptibility to the effects of movies. In addition, the movies had stronger effects on less intelligent children, children from lower-income households, children whose parents neglected them, and children who had a greater inclination toward criminal behavior. One of the key findings of these studies is that motion pictures do not exert a strong and universal influence on all children. While the results undoubtedly unnerved many people at the time, particularly the autobiographies showing how criminal teens were inspired by motion picture idols, the concluding summary presents a remarkably balanced accounting across the twelve studies: “That the movies exert an influence there can be no doubt. But it is our opinion that this influence is specific for a given child and a given movie. The same picture may influence different children in distinctly opposite directions. Thus in a general survey such as we have made, the net effect appears small.”12

  Taken as a whole, then, the results of the Payne Fund Studies produced no evidence to support the hypodermic needle perspective. But does that mean that their results changed prevailing ideas about the effects of movies on children in American society? The answer is no. The critical responses in the media at the time indicated little consensus among societal groups about the power of the media. On the one hand, parents and practitioners held that the Payne Fund Studies supported the idea that motion pictures posed a serious threat to youth, and especially delinquent youth. On the other hand, fearing censorship and regulation, many journalists heavily criticized the studies.13

  Despite all the criticism, the Payne Fund Studies represent an important milestone in the history of media effects research. After their completion, several decades would pass before researchers once again examined the influence of the mass media on children and adolescents. The Second World War was looming, pushing any worries about media effects well into the background. It was only after the advent of television, in the 1950s, that researchers once again began to take an interest in the subject.

  More Cracks: The War of the Worlds Study

  Several years after the publication of the Payne Fund Studies, another research project chipped away at the hypodermic needle perspective. Although it did not focus specifically on children, it is relevant nevertheless. The 1940 study, conducted by the social psychologist Hadley Cantril, examined the audience’s response to the infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast.14 Aired in October 1938, this radio play, directed and narrated by Orson Welles, was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s famous novel of the same name. The radio play “reported” news of an alien invasion in North America. The broadcast described how Martians were destroying parts of New Jersey. Welles wanted the radio play to be as realistic as possible. He presented it as a live newscast of developing events, including interviews with fictitious government officials and faked eyewitness accounts of the invasion. To the astonishment of all concerned, the broadcast caused approximately one million listeners to panic (see figure 3.1 for an example of the numerous news articles that appeared about the upheaval that the radio play caused). Many listeners telephoned their neighbors and relatives to warn them about the invasion. Many fled their homes, bundling the children and Grandma into the car and heading for the hills, convinced that what they had heard on the radio was actually happening. In the days following the broadcast, the radio station was inundated with complaints about the play’s effect on listeners.

  Figure 3.1. New York Daily News article from October 31, 1938, about the upheaval caused by the radio play War of the Worlds. (New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images)

  In his study, Cantril examined why the broadcast sowed panic in some but not all listeners. After all, sixteen million people had listened to the radio play, but “only” a million had panicked. In and of itself, this finding disproves the hypodermic needle perspective. If this perspective were correct, then everyone should have been frightened by the broadcast. Cantril and his research team conducted 135 in-depth interviews with listeners, some who had panicked and others who had not. The researchers discovered that those who had panicked tended to be religious. They had taken the invasion as a sign from God and thought that the end of the world was at hand. Compared with the non-panickers, those who had panicked more often suffered from low self-esteem and emotional instability, and showed less ability to think critically and size up new situations accurately. The environment in which people learned of the “invasion” also played an important role. People who tuned in to the station after a telephone call from a frightened acquaintance tended to be more fearful, a phenomenon often referred to as emotional contagion. When people witness others responding emotionally to something, including a media broadcast or event, they tend to experience the same emotions. Cantril’s study demonstrated once again that the nature and size of media effects hinge largely on the user’s personality and the social context in which the particular medium is being used.

  Many publications covering the history of media effects research posit that the universal media effects perspective held sway until the late 1950s, and that this perspective began to change only when conditional (or limited) media effects theories gained credence. But the results of the Payne Fund Studies and Cantril’s War of the Worlds study show that the hypodermic needle perspective was the subject of debate long before the 1950s. Empirical evidence against this perspective had begun to mount in the 1930s and 1940s. In fact, in 1948, Bernard Berelson succinctly summarized the conditional media effects perspective as follows: “Some kinds of communication, on some kinds of issues, brought to the attention of some kinds of people, under certain kinds of conditions, have some kinds of effects.”15

  Historical accounts of media effects theories often claim that it was Joseph Klapper’s book The Effects of Mass Communication (1960) that led to the abandonment of universal media effects theories and their replacement by conditional media effects theories. But Klapper was not responsible for this paradigm shift. Although his work marks an important milestone in the history of media effects research, Klapper’s pivotal contribution was that he thoroughly reviewed and summarized previous research. Like his predecessors, most notably Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, Klapper recognized that the effects of media are limited.16 His selective exposure theory argues that people can attend to only a limited number of messages out of the constellation of messages vying for their attention, and that only those messages people select have the potential to influence them. Klapper argued that people have a tendency not only toward selective exposure, but also toward selective perception, selective interpretation, and selective retention.

  According to Klapper’s theory, people tend to favor information that reinforces their existing preferences and behavior. They actively seek out such information and tend to ignore conflicting information. Thus, the media are more likely to bolster existing attitudes and behavior than to cause people to change their behavior. This insight built on evidence acquired in the Payne Fund Studies in 1933: “The movies tend to fix and further establish the behavior patterns and types of attitudes which already exist among those who attend most frequently.”17 Selective exposure—the tendency to gravitate toward media content that is consistent with our beliefs, attitudes, and preferences—is still one of the main assumptions of contemporary media effects theories.

  Contemporary Media Effects Theories

  The conditional media effects perspective remains the prevailing paradigm in the field of media psychology. In the past two decades, researchers have acknowledged that youth, like adults, are not mere passive and involuntary recipients of media effects. New media effects models have arisen, for example, Michael Slater’s reinforcing spiral model,18 Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory,19 and Richard Petty and John Cacioppo’s
elaboration likelihood model.20 Another much-cited model is Craig Anderson and Brad Bushman’s general aggression model, which focuses on the media’s influence on aggressive behavior, but can be useful for understanding other types of media effects as well.21 In 2013, Patti Valkenburg and Jochen Peter merged these media effects theories into a new model, termed the differential susceptibility to media effects model (DSMM).22

  Media Use as Cause and Effect

  Many studies examining media effects assume that media use can bring about changes in knowledge, beliefs, emotions, attitudes, and behavior. According to such studies, media use is a cause, and it triggers a process of change or influence in the media user. But media effects are not that straightforward. As Wilbur Schramm and colleagues lamented in the 1960s: “Effects are not that simple,” even though “we wish they were.”23 Modern media effects theories see media use not only as a cause of changes in a media user, but also as an effect. In other words, although these theories support the idea that media use can bring about changes in media users, they identify the media user, and not the media, as the starting point for that process.24 Media use is seen as an outcome of a number of factors related to the media user, for example, the user’s age, his or her motives, interests, earlier experiences, and his or her family or peer group. All these factors predict media use (for example, the content that a user selects or the frequency of its use). In other words, our media use is the result of who we are, what we want or strive for, and with whom we keep company.

  This idea of modern media effects theories is elaborated on in the DSMM, in which three global factors are argued to predict youths’ (and adults’) media use. The first factor, disposition, reflects every person-based trait that could influence a person’s media use, including gender, personality, temperament, intelligence, motivations, and cognitive schemas. For example, we know that children with an aggressive temperament tend to favor depictions of violence in media. We similarly know that personality traits such as sensation seeking and empathy, as well as certain moods, are strong predictors of media use.

  The second factor that predicts media use is age or developmental level. In fact, as we show later in the book, age or developmental level is one of the most important predictors of media use and preferences. Toddlers, for example, typically prefer media with a slow pace, familiar contexts, and simple characters. But these specific preferences rapidly evolve during childhood to a preference for a faster pace, adventurous content, and more sophisticated characters. And by adolescence there is often a significant shift toward the use of social media, and an interest in media entertainment that humorously presents irreverent or risky behavior.

  The third and final predictor of media use is the social environment of the media user. These social influences can act on micro (for example, family, peers), meso (school, church), and macro levels (cultural norms and values). For example, parents can forbid or stimulate exposure to certain films or games. Similarly, peers can implicitly or explicitly encourage or discourage one another’s media use. After all, every teenager wants to do or see what’s cool. And finally, schools or governments can forbid or encourage access to certain media content.

  Media Effects Are Conditional

  The second assumption underpinning contemporary media effects theories is that media effects are conditional in nature and not universal. Just as the Payne Fund Studies concluded that the same motion picture could influence children in different ways, recent brain research has similarly confirmed that individuals can respond in entirely different ways to the same stimuli. Richard Davidson, for example, has shown that activity in certain brain areas can vary by a factor of thirty in people exposed to the same emotional pictures.25

  If media use influences children in different, and even opposite, directions, the net effect of media use on their knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior can never be large. That was the conclusion of the Payne Fund Studies. A wealth of research published since then has confirmed, over and over, that media effects established in large and heterogeneous groups of children are only small to moderate. Notably, these small-to-moderate effect sizes are also common in research examining the influence of other environmental factors, such as parenting style, on children’s beliefs, attitudes, and behavior.26 Indeed, numerous studies in the past decades have shown that human beliefs, attitudes, and behavior are the result of a complex set of dispositional and environmental influences. And because media and parenting styles each represent only one of many influencing factors in a child’s environment, and because both can have different effects on different children, their influences can never be very great if they are assessed among large and heterogeneous groups of children.

  The small-to-moderate media effects found in heterogeneous groups are by no means unimportant ones. Such media effects usually suggest that the influence of media use pertains to smaller groups of children. For example, it has been estimated that 5–10 percent of children are vulnerable to media violence as a source of aggression.27 Although our knowledge about who these children are is currently growing, we still do not know precisely which children are susceptible to media violence effects. To develop such an understanding, we must study individual susceptibility to media effects, a strand of research rapidly gaining momentum in media effects research.28

  Interest in individual susceptibility to environmental influences is growing in a number of other research disciplines as well. In medicine, for example, “personalized medicine” is on the rise; in education, advances in information and communication technology are leading to personalized learning strategies. And in developmental psychology, there is the orchid-dandelion hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, most children are like dandelions, able to thrive in almost any environment imaginable. A smaller group of children, the orchids, have the potential to outshine the dandelions, but only if they grow up in an appropriately stimulating environment. Without that environment, they will wither away.29

  These differential susceptibility perspectives have something in common. They all explore the interaction between disposition and a single environmental factor, for example, a medication or a parenting style. Promising as such models may be, many are still too simple to explain the complex nature of human behavior. The future lies in assessing more complex models that examine the relationship between disposition and a number of environmental factors simultaneously.

  Toward Personalized Media Effects

  The DSMM is a complex model of the kind discussed above. It allows us to investigate the interplay between disposition and environmental factors, and to identify which children are especially susceptible to media effects. The three factors that predict children’s media use (disposition, developmental level, and social environment) are particularly important in this regard. Besides predicting children’s media use, these three factors can also influence the effects that media have on children’s knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. These three factors therefore play two conceptual roles in the media effects process.

  We can explain the double role of dispositional, developmental, and social context factors more clearly by discussing some examples of each. As for disposition, it has been shown that children with an aggressive temperament are more likely to prefer violent entertainment than their nonaggressive peers. This means that an aggressive temperament predicts these children’s media use (role 1: predictor). Other studies have shown, however, that children with aggressive temperaments are also more likely to be negatively influenced by media violence. In other words, an aggressive temperament can also intensify the effect of media use on aggressive behavior. A variable that changes the effect of one variable (media use) on another (aggressive behavior) is known as a moderator. In this particular case, an aggressive temperament may strengthen the effect of media use on aggression (role 2: moderator).

  The other two predictive factors, developmental stage and social environment, can similarly moderate the effects of media use on certain outcomes. For e
xample, by the time children reach puberty, they become more interested in sexual media content (role 1: developmental level as predictor). But at the same time, teens at this age are more vulnerable than other age groups to the negative effects of sexual media content because they are relatively inexperienced and struggle with putting such content into perspective (role 2: developmental level as moderator). Last, in the social environment, parents play an important role in the media their children use (role 1: social environment as predictor). Moreover, through the use of media-related parenting strategies, parents can also increase the positive effects of educational media and mitigate the negative effects of violent media (role 2: social environment as moderator).

  Media Effects Are Reciprocal

  Finally, contemporary media effects theories agree that media effects are reciprocal. In other words, media use may have an effect on (some) children, but these effects in turn may influence how children subsequently use media. Studies have shown, for example, that some children become hyperactive or aggressive after exposure to media violence. But there is also convincing evidence that aggressive or hyperactive children watch violent forms of entertainment media more often than other children. Similarly, the relationship between a child’s developmental level and media use is often reciprocal. Developmental level is one of the key predictors of children’s media use, but media use can also have a positive or negative effect on a child’s development. When we refer to media effects, then, we must realize that children—by shaping their own media use—also, in part, shape their own media effects. This notion has important implications for parents, who, especially in the case of young children, can exert a strong influence on their children’s media use. Media-specific parenting is a topic to which we return in chapter 14.

  Conclusion

  Contemporary media effects theories generally agree that media effects are conditional and reciprocal. In the past decades, there has been a shift in the focus of research. In modern media effects theories, there is less emphasis on whether media effects exist, and more interest in the underlying mechanisms of media effects, and in identifying who is particularly susceptible to such effects. The arrival of Web 2.0 has increased the size and scope of these questions. We need to understand the effects of media on recipients of media, and to ask how sending or creating media messages may affect the senders. We therefore expect that the future of media effects research will be characterized by increasingly complex models that are sensitive to the increasingly complex experience known as media use. To return again to Schramm and his colleagues: “Effects are not that simple,” even though “we wish they were.”30