Exemplification Theory and Cognitive Heuristics
In F.T. Durso Et al (Eds.), (2007) Handbook of applied cognition (2nd ed.) . (pp. 659-682). Chichester UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Cognition and Media
Richard Jackson Harris, Elizabeth T. Cady, and Christopher P. Barlett
Kansas State University
Here is a little quiz. Do each of the following as best you can.
1. Hum the theme music from the movie Jaws.
2. Sing Thriller by Michael Jackson.
3. Name the six characters on Friends.
Most people can accurately do each of the above, because it is virtually impossible to escape the influence of mass media. It is not the scope of this chapter to attempt to define exactly what the mass media are, because the concept of media is evolving and means different things to different people. While mass media have traditionally been seen as encompassing print (newspapers and magazines) and electronic/broadcast (radio and television), recent technology has blurred the distinctions between media and entertainment and between mass and personal media. Such activities as using the Internet, watching movies, or playing video games are often considered a part of media. People spend more time each week watching television than in any other activity except sleeping and working (Harris, 2004). In 2003, 13- and 14-year-olds spent almost 14 hours a week watching television and almost 17 hours on the Internet (J. Weaver, 2003a). Seventy per cent of college students play video games at least “once in a while” (J. Weaver, 2003b). Moreover, there are around 1500 daily and 8000 weekly newspapers and over 11,000 different magazines published in the U.S. (Wilson & Wilson, 1998).
Mass media can benefit society by reporting daily news, playing the Top 40 music hits, or televising public service announcements. However, there are also some negative aspects to media. For example, violent television and video games have been blamed for everything from a casual attitude toward mayhem to the 1999 Columbine High School shootings. Whether positive or negative, the mass media clearly do affect people’s lives. Although social psychologists have been studying these effects for decades, only more recently have cognitive psychologists seriously begun to look at mass media, exploring their effects on certain cognitive processes. This chapter discusses the general cognitive processes of attention, comprehension and memory, and decision making, and discusses how the media influences each. Media are a major source of knowledge, and how individuals process that information is vitally important to understanding their effects on attitudes and behavior.
Attention
Attention has long been an important area of study in cognitive psychology. Sternberg (2003) defines attention as a means of reducing the total amount of information that exists in the environment to a smaller amount that affords further processing, making attention clearly relevant to the mass media with its abundance of information. Specifically, cognitive psychologists studying media effects are concerned with allocation of attention and multi-tasking of media, both of which greatly affect media consumers and producers.
Allocation of Attention to Media
Since the media often contain large quantities of information, and people have limited processing ability, much media content is necessarily only incompletely processed. Although this issue applies to all media, research has predominantly focused on how people allocate attention to television. Although the average person watches 3-4 hours of television a day, having the television on does not necessarily mean that everyone in the room is fully attending to it. When the television is on, adults and children will only attend to it between 58 and 75 % of the time (Schmitt, Woolf, & Anderson, 2003).
However, children do not attend to all television equally. They attend more to television when they fully comprehend the program (Anderson, Lorch, Field, & Sanders, 1981). For example, children pay more attention to child-based content than adult-based content (Luecke-Aleksa, Anderson, Collins, & Schmitt, 1995) and attend to children’s television programs twice as much when no toys are present in the room competing for their attention as when toys are present (Lorch, Anderson, & Levin, 1979). Cognitive development is enhanced when actively attending to educational television programming (Anderson, Bryant, Wilder, Santomero, Williams, & Crawley, 2000), and children attend better to television programs when there are short scenes, much movement, and purposeful character behavior (Schmitt, Anderson, & Collins, 1999).
Sometimes a media message may require considerable attentional resources, and other times much fewer. This distinction is captured by the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), which posits two methods through which the consumer may be persuaded (Petty, Priester, & Briñol, 2002). The central route involves active processing of the content by a thinking person, while the peripheral route assumes a more direct effect of the superficial aspects of the media or message (e.g., attractiveness of source) on a relatively passive viewer. Persuasion through the peripheral route requires little attention allocation and occurs when the person has low motivation or inadequate background knowledge needed to process the message. Motivation to attend to a message for central processing would occur when the person believes that the information has relevance or wants to learn more and elaborate on that information. When such elements are missing, superficial aspects of the message, such as a sexy model or the presence of a celebrity spokesperson, may lead to persuasion through the peripheral route (Petty et al., 2002). The ELM also relates to comprehension and decision-making, which will be discussed later in the chapter.
Media and Multi-tasking
Seldom do people sit and actively attend to only the medium in front of them. Rather, they often multi-task, dividing their attention between the media source and an unrelated task. Simultaneously attending to two messages or activities that require controlled (conscious) processing is very difficult due to the limited capacity of attentional resources). Researchers have examined performance on certain cognitive tasks, such as reading comprehension or recalling
information, in the presence of certain media such as music or television.
Ransdell and Gilroy (2001) found that when background music was playing, undergraduates showed disrupted writing fluency (words generated per minute) while writing essays, suggesting that background music consumes cognitive resources. Likewise, attending to music can hinder other tasks. For instance, attending to song lyrics while driving is distracting and negatively impacts driving performance (Anderson, Carnagey, & Eubanks, 2003). Individuals tend to drive significantly faster when listening to fast tempo music compared to slow tempo or no music (Brodsky, 2001). In a simulated driving vigilance task, listening to high intensity music increased reaction time for stimuli in the periphery in a high demand condition (Beh & Hirst, 1999). These studies suggest that music may have a negative effect on driving under difficult conditions.
Like background music, background television can adversely affect performance on certain cognitive tasks. Armstrong and Chung (2000) found that students reading newspaper articles later scored lower on recall tasks if television had been on in the background. Pool, Koolstra, and van der Voort (2003) found that Dutch children’s homework completion time and total number of correct answers was hindered by a Dutch-language soap opera in the background but not by an English-language music video or no television at all (which may be a function of the differing languages of the media modality). Armstrong and Sopory (1997) found that background television had a negative effect on performance on the Brooks Visual-Spatial Working Memory Task. Although much of this research has shown that people have great difficulty simultaneously performing two tasks requiring conscious attention, this is not always so. Wickens (2002) offered an explanation for this apparent inconsistency by arguing that there is less interference in multi-tasking if the two stimuli do not use the same sensory modalities or coding channels (e.g., auditory vs. visual). This helps explain why many people are better able to perform two very different tasks that require conscious attention, such as solving algebra problems and listening to music.
Sometimes there may be performance decrements even when people believe they can successfully multi-task two different tasks simultaneously. For example, many people drive while using a cell phone, not only to talk but also to browse the Internet, watch a movie, answer e-mail, instant message, or play games. Research using driving simulators has shown, however, that drivers talking on either hand-held or hands-free cell phones make more driving errors and have longer reaction times than those not using the phones. In some cases the distraction can impair a driver as much or more than being legally drunk or slow the reaction time of a twenty-year-old to that of the average seventy-year-old (Strayer, Drews, Crouch, & Johnston, 2005; Strayer, Drews, & Johnston, 2003; Matthews, Legg, & Charlton, 2003).
Thus, although a considerable degree of multi-tasking with media sources is possible, it comes at a serious cost to performance on some other activity like driving or doing homework.
Comprehension and Memory
Comprehension of both linguistic and pictorial information in media involves many cognitive structures and processes, such as working memory to store and transform information, knowledge schemata to organize construction of memory representations, and cognitive heuristics to guide retrieval. In addition, individuals must possess sufficient background knowledge of the topic in order to fully comprehend the material (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995). Since the process of comprehension thus has direct ramifications for the quality and quantity of material later remembered, comprehension and memory will be considered together in this section.
Long-term Working Memory
Traditionally, working memory was conceived of as the momentary storage of information needed to complete an immediate cognitive task. This type of memory has limits on both the amount and duration of the information and does not have the flexibility to allow individuals to stop a cognitive activity, in contrast to reading, which requires memory to keep track of plot and characters, and then resume the activity without decreased performance or the need to review information already read (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995). To correct for this limitation of the working memory model, Ericsson and Kintsch (1995) introduced the concept of long-term working memory (LTWM), which allows for greater flexibility, although it requires domain-specific knowledge in the area of discourse. In terms of media, long-term working memory allows us to keep track of all the characters and plots in a complicated movie or novel over a longer time frame than what is available in traditional working memory (Butcher & Kintsch, 2003). For example, an individual can watch a mystery movie and remember critical information and clues long enough to solve the mystery. Previously read information is stored in long-term memory as the new information is processed, and any connections between the two serve as the retrieval cues underlying LTWM (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995).
Skill involved in LTWM consists of using easily retrieved cues in short-term working memory to rapidly recover information from long-term memory. Since long-term memory has a theoretically unlimited capacity, experts on a topic can readily store huge amounts of information about that topic. When media consumers watch a television show or read a magazine, their LTWM performs two functions. The first involves the immediate activation of background knowledge of the situation, which remains in LTWM in case it is needed for making an inference to understand the new material. This prerequisite knowledge arises from a lifetime of social and sensory experience, as well as knowledge of consistent patterns in certain media genres (Butcher & Kintsch, 2003). The second use of LTWM in comprehension involves the maintenance of the situation model constructed throughout the reading process. In other words, the reader or viewer understands the input by making inferences and building a model of the events. As the reader or viewer learns new information, LTWM keeps the model activated so it can be updated (Butcher & Kintsch, 2003).
Schemata
Encoding information into long-term memory draws upon schemata, structures of knowledge in the long-term memory of the perceiver. These cognitive structures become the framework for accepting incoming episodic information, which then becomes integrated into a memory representation that reflects both the prior schematic information and the new stimulus input (Bartlett, 1932; Brewer & Nakamura, 1984).
While schemata provide a framework for encoding new information, integration between the two sources of information has been argued to occur at the situation model or mental model level of representation (Kintsch, 1998). A situation model involves the activation and integration of both mental schemata and currently attended information in the environment, leading to the observer’s real-time monitoring and understanding of the situation, environments, and other individuals (Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). Such integration at the level of the situation model ultimately leads to schema modification. If the new information is congruent with the activated schema, the information will be integrated into the existing schema. If the information is incongruent, accommodation occurs, which may result in the formation of a new schema.
Although we generally form and modify schemata through direct experience, certain schemata may be formed through vicarious experience, especially through the media (Harris, 2004). For example, a teenager growing up in rural Nebraska might have a schema about life in New York City, although she has never visited there. Instead, she might build her knowledge base from information gained from both entertainment and news media. Thus, her schema relies heavily on the view of reality projected by the producers of that media. Similarly, another teenager living in Los Angeles might form a schema of rural life based on what he sees in the media, which would necessarily reflect the views of the media producers, who may have limited life experience with rural life. Media might also inform the contents of schemata about certain groups of individuals, such as ethnic minorities or people from other countries. The influence of the media on this knowledge base increases as the amount of life experience with those groups decreases.
In addition, stored schemata may affect comprehension of media events (Harris, 2004). For example, a person watching a basketball game on television follows the events of the game by using schematic information about basketball to understand the actions of the players or referees. The same happens in media entertainment genres, especially if the viewer can identify in some way with the characters or situations in the show, which allows the viewer to retrieve particular schemata to comprehend the plot. For example, a teenager watching a teen drama will comprehend it differently than an adult viewer. In much the same way that schemata guide understanding of real world events, comprehension of the media proceeds using previously known information.
Activity schemata, called scripts, organize information about events and aid in comprehending events or the media. Low and Durkin (2000) found that even young children ages 5 to 11 use a script to comprehend television shows. The children were shown one of two abridged versions of a crime drama. One version showed the story in the common form (i.e. scenes in the order of crime, investigation, chase, arrest, and court), while the other rearranged the same scenes. The youngest children recalled the story best when they saw the common form, although older children were able to understand the other version, indicating that while young children use well-defined scripts to understand television, older children display more flexibility (Low & Durkin, 2000).
Framing
Framing by the media involves choices made by producers regarding what information to provide the public and how to communicate it. One important use of a frame is to inform the public what issues it should think of as important (Cohen, 1963), what communications researchers call “agenda-setting” (McCombs & Reynolds, 2002). The frame of a news report thus affects how viewers understand the issue under discussion. The media employ frames to emphasize certain aspects of the world while downplaying others. By doing so, they help ensure that the input is attended to and comprehended in certain ways (Entman, 1993). For example, if the media are the only source from which people acquire information about a particular sport, fans will only learn what fits into the frame employed by the media.
On a more local scale, even a minor change in the wording of an advertisement may activate a frame, which then guides cognitive processing. For example, consider meat advertised as “75 per cent lean” versus “only 25 per cent fat.” Consumers evaluate the former more favorably than the semantically identical latter wording (Levin & Gaeth, 1988). Similarly, most consumers prefer receiving a “discount” rather than a “surcharge,” even if the final cost is the same. A positive frame leads to construction of a more positive image of the product.
Frames perform four specific functions. First, they identify the issues and problems that merit media coverage. Second, frames articulate the reasons and agents that have led to these problems. Third, they judge the causes in terms of certain moral tenets. In this way, the viewers learn who is to blame and how those people should be judged. Finally, frames give specific suggestions for dealing with these issues (Entman, 1993). In this way, the frame chosen by the media producers can influence the thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs of the viewer.
Frames can occur in four stages within the mass communication process. First, the media producers utilize their own frames or schemata (Entman, 1993) to determine what to communicate to the public. This agenda-setting technique begins by increasing the relevance of a topic until the media consumers focus their attention, thoughts, and actions on it (McCombs & Reynolds, 2002). In this way, the media producers begin to shape the opinions of the public. For example, sports media use a frame that values the athletic accomplishments of males more than those of females, so sports reporters focus on men’s sports far more than on women’s sports. This contributes to the public valuing men’s sports and athletes more than women’s.
Second, the media message itself incorporates specific images, words, or sources of information that stem from the specific frames (Entman, 1993). Taking the sports media example, the language used to describe male athletes usually focuses on their strength or abilities, while the language describing female athletes highlights their physical appearance (Billings, Halone, & Denham, 2002; Eastman & Billings, 2000; Halbert & Latimer, 1994). Third, the prevalent social culture provides certain frames that are common across many people within a society. In other words, although the mass media choose to focus on men’s sports at the expense of women’s, these media frames in part reflect a culture that tends to value athleticism in males more than in females (Kane, 1988). Finally, viewers bring their own frames to the media experience. For example, a woman who has participated in sports might be more likely to focus on the athletic accomplishments portrayed in the media than on the appearance of the athletes.
Framing can also affect coverage of political campaigns, which in turn can affect voters’ knowledge and behavior about the candidates. For example, Jamieson and Waldman (2003) identified two predominant negative frames in press discussion of candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore in the U.S. Presidential election in 2000. Bush was seen as dim-witted and highly prone to speech errors (“Dumbo” frame), while Gore was seen as stretching the truth and trying to pander to all constituencies (“Pinocchio” frame). With these frames guiding the media stories about the candidates, Bush’s speech errors and ignorance of certain facts (“who is the leader of Pakistan?”) were widely reported, while Gore’s stretching of the truth (“I invented the Internet”) and inconsistent statements to different groups received more attention. Conversely, speech errors and lack of knowledge were not noted in Gore, while factual misstatements and “pandering” from Bush slid by largely unnoticed. Interestingly enough, after the 9-11-01 terrorist attacks, the Dumbo frame to describe Bush essentially disappeared in favor of a “strong leader” frame. Many commented how Bush had changed as a leader as a result of responding to the attacks, but it may have more been the reporters covering the President who changed (Jamieson & Waldman, 2003).
Comprehension of News
News offers a useful domain in which to test people’s cognition in a real world setting, which has both applied and theoretical importance (McCombs & Reynolds, 2002; Price & Czilli, 1996). News stories in all media are typically fairly short, self-contained pieces. Schneider and Laurion (1993) found that people’s assessment of what they had remembered from radio news was fairly accurate. With television, however, the simultaneous presence of the visual and auditory information provides the potential of these modalities either complementing or interfering with each other. In general, memory for pictorial material is better than memory for verbal material (Graber, 1990), and memory overall is better if there is a close fit between the video and the audio components, such as when the video illustrates exactly what the reporter is describing. When the relationship is less clear or when the video and audio portions evoke different previous information from the viewer’s memory, comprehension and memory for the new information suffers (Grimes, 1991; Mundorf, Drew, Zillmann, & Weaver, 1990). Memory for persons in the news can also be affected by the viewers’ social attitudes, such as whites being more likely to identify an African-American than a Caucasian as a criminal suspect (Gibbons, Taylor, & Phillips, 2005; Oliver & Fonash, 2002). Assuming the video and audio portions are congruent, children remember news presented on television better than news presented only on radio or in print, even if the latter contained illustrations (Walma van der Molen & van der Voort, 2000).
The Availability Heuristic and the Importance of Vivid Exemplars
Often in comprehension of media, compelling exemplars are critically important. A cognitive heuristic called availability posits that we draw conclusions about the frequency or typicality of an event or instance based on how readily we can retrieve relevant exemplars from memory (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973, 1974). These easily retrieved examples are then seen as highly typical, when in fact that may not be the case. If the first examples of Arabs that come to mind are villains from film entertainment and terrorists from news, we may come to believe a larger proportion of Arabs are terrorists than is in fact the case. The positive potential of this principle is also considerable; for example, if Will Truman of the popular sitcom Will and Grace becomes the prime example of a gay man, the social perception by heterosexuals of gay men might be improved considerably. Entertainment presents numerous vivid and memorable exemplars of diverse people and situations; when the distribution of these exemplars deviates strongly from the real-world distribution, the risk of viewers having a skewed view of the world markedly increases.
The power of vivid exemplars. Sometimes an unusually attractive or respected person or character can greatly influence attitudes or behavior in positive ways. For example, after a sexy “hunk” actor played a deaf character in a popular Brazilian soap opera, interest in learning sign language soared. When NBC news anchor Katie Couric invited Today show viewers to watch her colon exam live in 2000, requests for colonoscopies to screen for colon cancer rose 20 per cent, almost surely saving numerous lives (Bjerklie, 2003). Bonds-Raacke, Cady, Harris, Schlegel, & Firebaugh (in press) found that heterosexuals who thought about a positive gay character on TV had more positive attitudes towards gay men than those heterosexuals who thought about a either negative gay character or an unmarried character.
One basic aspect of human cognition is that the rich sensory experience of our world must be organized into meaningful knowledge categories for interpretation and storage in memory. Specific and highly available exemplars or instances of particular categories or classes of events often come to represent the entire category, whether or not they are in fact truly representative. Which exemplars will prevail to mentally define the category depends on the two major factors of frequency and vividness. The more often an instance occurs, the more representative it will seem (Harris, Cady, & Tran, 2006). For example, if a large number of African-American men in movies are criminals or drug dealers, many viewers (especially those with limited life experience with African-American men) will come to see that image as typical of black men.
A particularly vivid example is highly memorable and thus is very readily called to mind when thinking of that category. For example, after the 1975 blockbuster movie Jaws portrayed numerous shark attacks on swimmers at ocean beaches, coastal resorts reported a significant loss in business. The highly vivid fictional attacks from Jaws, though extremely rare in real life, were readily remembered and taken to be far more typical beach experiences than was in fact the case. Vivid cases that elicit high levels of arousal (such as a shark attack) are especially memorable, as are vivid cases that are frequently repeated (Harris, et al., 2006).
Gibson and Zillmann (1994) found that readers of a magazine news story about carjacking evaluated the crime as both more serious and more frequent if the story had contained an extreme example (victim killed in the crime) than if it had been less extreme (victim injured little or not at all).
Comprehension of risk. Media reporting of vivid exemplars of crimes play a large role in people’s assessment of their own personal risk. Even though violent crime rates in most places fell precipitously between 1990 and 2005, most of the public believed they had risen, perhaps because there has been a 400 per cent increase in U.S. network news coverage of murders during this period. Most news stories are heavy on coverage of specific events and exemplars and much lighter on deeper inquiry and analysis of causes or historical background.
Language and framing of the exemplars also affect the audience’s assessment of their own personal risk from threats such as disease or violence. News reports routinely cover rare but dramatic deaths like homicides or national disasters more heavily than they do more frequent but less dramatic deaths such as those from heart disease or strokes. In addition, sensational risk factors for crimes and diseases, such as the use of illicit drugs, are covered more extensively than more prevalent risk factors such as obesity (Glassner, 1999). One model of why people fear very unlikely events stems from exemplification theory, which provides a framework for memory of events (Zillmann, 2002). As people watch a news report, they attend to and subsequently recall the information in it according to three principles. First, if the event covered in the report is concrete rather than abstract, it is more likely to be recalled. For example, given two stories on flesh-eating bacteria, one interviewing a victim who developed the disease after contracting strep and a second story giving the actual rates of infection (which are very low) but without any specific examples of people who caught strep without developing the bacteria complication, viewers later recall the more vivid and concrete interview and overestimate the occurrence of flesh-eating bacteria (Glassner, 1999).
Second, events judged to be important are attended to and recalled better than events judged to be irrelevant, especially if the events contain emotion-laden information. Because highly emotional events would have been more relevant to survival in the evolutionary past, humans have a well-developed limbic system that enables superior encoding of memories during times of strong emotion (Zillmann, 2002). Highly emotional news photos, such as a shot of a bloody disfigured body of an accident or war victim, evoke activation in the amygdala, and these pictures are better recalled (Levine & Pizarro, 2004). However, the encoding of the immediately preceding text may be disrupted by the picture (Christianson & Loftus, 1987; Loftus & Burns, 1982; Newhagen & Reeves, 1992). Furthermore, verbal material presented during or after the intense image is remembered shortly afterward as well as or, in the case of material presented immediately after the image, sometimes even better than material without an accompanying intense image. Apparently, the intense emotional image disrupts the rehearsal in working memory for the immediately preceding information, much as a head injury can produce retroactive amnesia for events just preceding the impact. However, the intense picture is itself highly memorable and may enhance memory for subsequent related information by serving as a mental model or organizational schema for the construction of a memory representation.
Third, the occurrence of widely publicized similar events inflates one’s estimation of the frequency of that category of events. After several school shootings that took place in the U.S. in the late 1990s, many people began to fear being shot at school and to believe that school violence was epidemic, despite the fact that the probability of violence in schools was declining and remained very low. The same occurred after the terrorist attacks of 9-11-01. Overall, heavy coverage of violent crime in the media leads to overestimates of the frequency of crime, although actual crime rates in the United States declined from 1993 to 2005 (Bureau of Justice, 2005).
Such mis-cognitions may have serious consequences. A gruesome story about the abduction and murder of a child evokes strong emotions in viewers, causing them to attend to the story and recall it readily as a highly available and typical exemplar of the class of events “child disappearances.” As a result, people overestimate the probability of such events and misunderstand their typical character. The intense emotion induced by the story will then cause the viewer to fear child abduction by a stranger, even though the large majority of child disappearances are runaways and the perpetrator in 76 % of the actual child abductions is a non-custodial parent or someone else known to the child (OJJDP, 2000).
In addition to news, entertainment media also contribute to viewers’ overestimation of risk. Criminal behavior prevails in entertainment media, especially police dramas and action-adventure shows. Although less than 1% of the crimes committed in the U.S. are murders, half of media crimes are murders (Bushman & Anderson, 2001; Oliver, 1994). In addition, mentally ill characters in the media are portrayed as violent 72% of the time (Signorielli, 1989), although the proportion of mentally ill individuals who are violent in reality is only 11% (Teplin, 1985).
Portrayals of ethnic groups. Vivid exemplars may also be taken as typical representatives of various social groups. Although the number of African-Americans on U.S. television has greatly increased since the 1960s and now approximates the proportion in the general population, they still tend to disproportionately appear in situation comedies or police dramas (Greenberg, Mastro, & Brand, 2002). In contrast, Latinos, although even greater in numbers than African-Americans in the general population, only comprise 2% of prime-time TV characters (Poniewozik, 2001), mostly in comedic, criminal, or police roles. Native Americans in media are almost entirely Plains Indians from TV and movie Westerns; thus, most Americans’ prototypical “Indian” became a Plains Indian, not a Navajo, Kwakiutl, Cherokee, or Iroquois. With the decline of the genre of Westerns, Native Americans have all but disappeared from the media, although the vivid Plains buffalo-hunting image persists.
The small number of characters overall, combined with the stereotypical portrayal of minorities in the media, can thus lead to prejudiced views of these groups, especially in those majority-group viewers with limited life experience with members of the group in question (Greenberg, et al., 2002). Givens and Monahan (2005) used an indirect measure of prejudice consisting of determining if various adjectives accurately described a target individual, who was either an African American woman or a White woman. They found that participants who had previously seen a video clip showing a highly sexualized African American woman (the “jezebel” image) were faster to respond to adjectives related to jezebels than were participants in the control condition. This indicates that media portrayals can make prejudiced attitudes more accessible. Children, especially those who have limited real-life experience with people unlike themselves, use television and movies as practice on which to build thoughts, emotions, and opinions, or to learn behaviors to employ when faced with others of a different race. Thus, the potential of television in creating, strengthening, or reducing prejudice is great (Graves, 1999).
Content analyses do not tell the whole story of how these portrayals affect the audience’s perception. A strong character in an immensely popular TV show might “drench” the viewer with an image of the minority that remains strong despite other portrayals the viewer might see. In this way, certain actors and characters, such as Bill Cosby’s Dr. Cliff Huxtable from The Cosby Show, will exert far more influence on the perceptions of the group being portrayed than the many other less-seen exemplars of the same group (Greenberg, 1988). However, viewing examples of individuals who do not fit into a stereotype will not necessarily easily change stereotypes held by the viewer. Richards and Hewstone (2001) define subtyping as the process of grouping those who deviate from a stereotype into a new category separate from the stereotyped group. Rather than relaxing the standards for inclusion into the stereotyped group and thus changing the stereotype, subtyping allows for stereotype maintenance. This occurs more with less typical group members than with more typical ones. On the other hand, subgrouping refers to the process of sorting individuals into several groups based on specific similarities, although those individuals are still viewed as being part of the larger, stereotyped group. This allows for variation within the stereotyped group and can serve to lessen the stereotype (Richards & Hewstone, 2001).
Exemplars and the peripheral route to persuasion. Recall from the discussion of the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) that the central route to persuasion makes less use of heuristics such as availability in cognitive processing, while the peripheral route relies strongly on them (Petty, et al., 2002). Many of the negative effects of using heuristics to process information in the media can be overcome by actively processing that information. For example, motivating viewers to process information deeply can lessen cultivation effects, which occur when viewers perceive the external world as similar to the world portrayed in the media (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, Signorielli, & Shanahan, 2002; Shrum, 2002). Although media consumers tend to ignore base-rate information in favor of higher-impact exemplars, if someone believes that information given in base-rate terms will be helpful, he or she will attend to it (Zillmann, 2002). Anything that makes base-rate information more salient thus contributes to overall media literacy.
Autobiographical Memory
Autobiographical memory consists of knowledge about events or experiences that have occurred in one’s own life, including experiences that involve the media (Conway, 2001; Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Autobiographical memory contains both sensory-perceptual and abstract semantic knowledge. The first leads to a relatively exact memory trace, leading to a mental replay for portions of the event, while the latter concerns a person’s unique history, which affects one’s interpretation of the event. Due to the presence of these types of knowledge, memories can be accurate in terms of both objective reality and one’s self-concept (Anderson & Conway, 1997). Rich memories for event-specific knowledge often are encoded with imagery, which helps elicit vivid memories. Although we do not tend to remember as many supporting details from events that did not occur as from those that did, we can also recall vivid but false memories of events that never happened (Garry, Manning, Loftus, & Sherman, 1996; Garry & Polaschek, 2000; Sharman, Manning, & Garry, 2005). These attributions of reality can be influenced by the motivation, biases, and experiences, as well as metacognitive skills, of the person recalling the event (Mitchell & Johnson, 2000), thus reflecting the malleability of memory.
Autobiographical memory can be studied by presenting some type of cue and asking for a memory related to that cue. In media research, these cues often relate to autobiographical memories of events, characters, or programs watched at some point in one’s life. This method allows research into the effects on children of antisocial messages in media, such as sex or violence (Cantor, Mares, & Hyde, 2003; Harrison & Cantor, 1999; Hoekstra, Harris, & Helmick, 1999). By asking adults about their memories of seeing an R-rated movie as a child, for example, one can indirectly study effects without exposing young participants for research purposes. Although there is an inherent problem of the inability to verify the memories of the experience of watching a media event, the major interest is the remembered experience, with objective accuracy of the memories of less concern than the participant’s memory of them (Harris, Bonds-Raacke, & Cady, 2005). In such a study, the participant might be instructed to think of the overall experience of watching a frightening or sexually themed movie in their childhood. Once the experience has been recalled, the participant rates various aspects of the event on several dimensions. For example, the experience of watching a frightening movie might be rated for negative effects (e.g. insomnia) or positive effects (e.g. enjoyment) experienced. Using the autobiographical memory technique in this way allows probing, albeit indirectly and retrospectively, of the effects of seeing characters or events under more ecologically valid viewing circumstances, rather than in a short segment viewed in more artificial situations.
Music also plays a large role in autobiographical memory, and participants make more accurate time estimates of when a song had been popular when they use associated autobiographical memories as cues (Bartlett & Snelus, 1980). Both college students and adults ages 66-71 best remember and most prefer music that was popular during their adolescence, although the older adults did not remember those songs as well as the younger group overall, unless the song evoked a strong emotional memory (Schulkind, Hennis, & Rubin, 1999).
Decision Making
Decision making involves selecting from among choices or possible outcomes. The media influence decision making in terms of what products to buy, which candidate to vote for, or whether a defendant is guilty or innocent. This section discusses how media affect judgments and decisions in response to advertising and news.
Influencing Purchase Decisions
The goal of most advertising is to persuade consumers to buy products or use services. Social psychology has long been interested in factors that determine how people are persuaded by messages. In order for an advertisement to significantly impact the viewer, three elements need to be involved: the communicator, the message, and the recipient (Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953). Source (communicator characteristics) and content (message characteristics) are two factors that influence how people make decisions as a function of exposure to media.
Source. The source factor includes credibility and likeability, both components of who is delivering the message. Credibility involves the perceived expertise of the source. If the source of the information is credible (i.e., a prestigious journal versus a popular magazine), participants will rate the prestigious source as more trustworthy (Hovland & Weiss, 1951). Furthermore, participants rate people who appear knowledgeable, smart, or have impressive credentials to be experts (Hass, 1981). An example of this includes an advertisement of a person in a lab coat with a stethoscope selling aspirin. This person may not be a doctor (and in some cases may actually admit this in the ad) but still has the appearance of a medical expert. Unless the message is of great importance, viewers will probably accept the message without much scrutiny and fail to use central processing techniques of the sort outlined in the ELM model (Petty et al., 2002) to question the apparent expertise of the spokesperson (Maddux & Rogers, 1980).
Another source variable is likeability, which relates to how attractive, charming, athletic, or popular the source is (Hovland, et al., 1953). Michael Jordan made commercials for Hanes underwear and Ballpark Franks years after his retirement, and supermodels are paid to sell underwear, jeans, and beer. Such advertisements can be very effective because of the attractive or knowledgeable source, even if that source has no more expertise than the viewer about the product (Harris, 2004). One explanation for the perception of knowledge in the spokesperson may be affect infusion, in which an individual relies in part on affective information to reach a conclusion that requires judging incoming information (Forgas, 1995). This model suggests that if Michael Jordan has a positive affective tag associated with him, and the judgment needs to be made efficiently (which is often the case with short commercial advertisements), then the affect-as-information heuristic (Schwartz, 1990) is implemented. This leads to the source being perceived as credible, even if the actors have no prior experience with the product.
Content. The content factor involves the information in the ad and how this information is presented as important to consumers and advertisers (Hovland, et al., 1953). For example, some Butterfingers candy bar ads state what the candy is made of and how good it tastes, while others show characters from The Simpsons eating the candy.
Several different types of advertising appeals have been shown to influence memory (Harris, 2004). One popular appeal is humor, which has spawned considerable psychological research. Furnham and Mori (2003) found that people scored higher on a cued recall test of ad content if the ad was humorous, while Krishnan and Chakravarti (2003) found that memory for brand names was higher if the ad was humorous. Finally, people have a better memory for ad content if it contained a cartoon than if it did not (Gunter, Baluch, Duffy, & Furnham, 2002).
Another class of appeals is emotional ads, which appeal to one’s feelings, such as a commercial with a grandfather hugging his grandchild. Studies have shown that products in emotional ads were better recalled than those in neutral ads (Friestad & Thorson, 1993; Hornik, 1989). One particularly potent kind of emotional appeal is the fear advertisement, which implies some sort of threat if the consumer does not heed the message. An example is the anti-drug spot with an egg in a frying in a pan and a voiceover message, “This is your brain…. This is your brain on drugs…. Any questions?” This commercial sends the message that taking drugs will “fry” your brain. Fear appeals can be very effective. Smokers were more likely to quit after viewing ads that involved a fear appeal (Smith & Stutts, 2003), especially if the viewer was an adult smoker (Beaudoin, 2002). The one caveat about fear appeals is that they may be counterproductive if the fear threat is so strong as to invoke defenses in the viewer (Witte, 1994).
Individual difference variables. The final factor that significantly contributes to the advertisement’s effectiveness is individual differences in the recipient. One such attitudinal variable is self-monitoring, where high self-monitors are individuals who attempt to adapt their personality to the environment and low self-monitors do not adapt to differing situations (Snyder, 1974). High self-monitors are more likely to pay for a product that has numerous images advertised, whereas low self-monitors are more likely to pay for a product that has more quality-oriented (functional value of the product) ads (Snyder & DeBono, 1985). These researchers suggest that high self-monitors will be more likely to respond to advertisements that are image oriented because that may be another manifestation of the desire to strive to blend in across differing situations, while low self-monitors may be interested in content-based advertisements because that quality will be consistent across most environments (Snyder & DeBono, 1985).
Another individual difference variable that affects decision making is need for cognition, which is the desire to understand and make sense of the surrounding world (Cohen, Stotland, Wolfe, 1955). Research has shown that when an advertising argument is strong both high and low need for cognition individuals will rate their attitudes toward and evaluate the message more positively. If a message is weak, however, low need for cognition individuals will rate and evaluate the message more positively than high need for cognition individuals (Cacioppo, Petty, Kao, & Rodriguez, 1986). In other words, if the message contains a strong argument, people will generally rate it as more positive. However, the salience of the message strength is more important to individuals high in need for cognition, and they will rate an advertisement as more positive if it is strong and as more negative if it is weak compared to low need for cognition individuals (Cacioppo et. al., 1986).
The Effect of News on Decision Making
Decision-making is also important in areas of media other than advertising. One of the most important areas involves news coverage.
One issue concerns the effect of media publicity on juror decision-making. Jurors’ exposure to specific pretrial publicity about a case does affect verdicts (Carroll, Kerr, Alfini, Weaver, MacCount, & Feldman, 1986; Shaw & Skolnick, 2004). Lurid pretrial information about a rape or murder case increases the likelihood of a conviction and cannot be erased by a judge’s direction to disregard the information. Another concern involves general pretrial publicity and jurors’ exposure to information about other cases involving similar issues. Greene and Wade (1987) had students either not read any story or read a news magazine story about either (a) the brutal rape of an elderly woman, or (b) the wrongful conviction of a man for a rape to which someone else later confessed. Later, in what was presented as an unrelated experiment, all participants acted as jurors for a different court case. Compared to the control group, twice as many (20% vs. 10%) who had read of the brutal rape said that the defendant in the second case was “definitely guilty.” Although 57 % of those reading about the prior miscarriage of justice called the new defendant “probably not guilty,” only 25 % did so after reading about the brutal rape, probably due to having that very available instance in their memory (cf. Tversky & Kahneman, 1973; Zillmann, 2002). In the real world, jurors’ prior exposure to such examples is all but impossible to control, because such cases receive heavy media coverage. As we have already seen, a powerful, vivid example can do much to drive future information processing and behavior (Zillmann, 2002).
In general, individuals maintain activation of information given in the media or in trials, even if that information has been specifically recanted. Johnson and Seifert (1998) had readers determine to which of two possible characters an anaphoric reference applied, and found that the readers tended to recall incorrect characters even when the information had been corrected in the same passage. This indicates that misinformation as well as true information affects readers’ text comprehension. This holds true in mock juries as well, although introducing suspicion about the motives of those presenting false information reduces the effect of the misinformation. Fein, McCloskey, & Tomlinson (1997) performed two different experiments in which participants read a transcript of a trial and then indicated guilt of the defendant. When the participants read news stories casting the defendant in a negative light prior to reading the transcript, they were more likely to give a guilty verdict despite reading the judge’s instructions to consider only the information presented in the trial. However, participants who read the stories along with an interview with the defendant’s lawyer who presented reasons to suspect the news media’s motives were less likely to vote guilty than those who only read the media stories. Similarly, participants who read statements in the transcript that were followed by an objection and instructions to the jury to disregard that information were more likely to vote guilty than both those who did not read the critical statements or those who also read a statement raising suspicion about why the prosecutor introduced the evidence.
Media news coverage frequently provides information that corrects or updates previously presented reports. In the case of the 2003 Iraq war, much information was presented as unconfirmed and then updated, and more was imparted as true and later retracted or corrected (Lewandowsky, Stritzke, Oberauer, & Morales, 2005). They presented respondents in three countries with news statements related to the Iraq war and asked them about their memory of those events. If they recalled the event, they were later asked to state whether initial information had been retracted, indicating that the original statement was false. The American respondents believed that both true and false retracted events were true, while Germans and Australians believed the true events but not those that had been discounted. Lewandowsky, et al. (2005) also found that the Americans believed in different justifications of the war than those in the other countries, specifically that they were more likely to agree with U.S. policy. Those participants who harbored suspicions about the reasons for war were more likely to discount the misinformation than those who were not suspicious, regardless of nationality. Similar to Fein, et al. (1997), this indicates that original reports are remembered even when they are later retracted, although those who suspect the reasons behind introducing false information are more likely to update their information and make decisions based on the corrected information than those having no suspicions (Lewandowsky, et al., 2005).
Political Media. Considerable research has looked at the various ways the media can influence political campaigns and elections. Houston, Doan, and Roskos-Ewoldsen (1999) asked participants to examine the campaigns of two different candidates. One campaign had a positive focus, while the other had a negative focus, and the participants were asked which candidate they liked. Results showed that the positive campaign elicited a more positive evaluation than the negative campaign. Benoit (1999) looked at U.S. Presidential nomination addresses between 1960 and 1996, and found that nominees used more acclaiming strategies (emphasizing their own positions) than attacking strategies (attacking the opponent’s positions). Overall, Democratic nominees used more acclaiming strategies and Republicans employed more attacking strategies. If a candidate used a negative focus campaign strategy that was seen as justified, people rated that candidate more favorably (Budesheim, Houston, & DePaola, 1996).
Political ads are another way of imparting political messages and ideas to voters. Some purposes of political advertising are name recognition, agenda setting, image building, issue exposition, and fundraising (Harris, 2004). Like the campaigns, political advertisements also differ in emotional valence, with positive ads emphasizing the candidate’s strengths and negative ads attacking the opponent. In terms of memory, negative ads are recalled better than positive ads, even though voters do not like them as well (Faber, 1992; Garramone, Atkin, Pinkleton, & Cole, 1990). Kaid (1997) found that using a negative ad did affect the voter’s image of the candidate, thus potentially influencing voting behavior. This presents a challenge for campaign strategists. Positive ads lead to a more favorable impression of, but poorer memory for, the candidate. On the other hand, negative ads increase recall but decrease approval of the candidate.
Politicians in the media can also provide information in the form of reminders of our own mortality. This might come in the reference to gruesome crime stories, threats of terrorism, or news of epidemics. Terror management theory (Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg, 2003) posits that such reminders of mortality can lead to more punitive judgments, the derogation of others, and generally defensive behaviors. Many years of programmatic research (summarized in Pyszczynski, et al, 2003) have supported the idea that the manipulation of mortality salience leads to such behaviors. Some have used terror management theory for an explanation of the success of U.S. President George W. Bush in his 2004 re-election campaign; by continually speaking about the 9-11-01 attacks and the threat of future attacks, he kept the mortality salience elevated, thus contributing to voters accepting his hard line internationally and refusing to “change horses” in leadership. Landau, Solomon, Greenberg, Cohen, Pyszczynski, Arndt, Miller, Ogilvie, and Cook (2004) performed several studies that forced participants in the United States to contemplate death before reading a statement that cast Bush and his actions in a highly positive light. Increasing mortality salience for participants led to more agreement with these statements as well as more intention to vote for Bush. In contrast, when participants thought about death their support for Presidential candidate John Kerry decreased, and these feelings of support were independent of the participants’ political opinions. These results were replicated when participants were provided reminders about the World Trade Center and September 11.
Media Literacy
In the early years of media effects research, investigators noticed the power of media in bringing about change in the attitudes or beliefs of the consumer. This direct effects model of media effects assumed large, immediate, and most often negative effects on the audience. Although this paradigm dominated early media research, more recently researchers have viewed media as having more modest effects, which depend greatly on the attention, comprehension, memory, and perception of the consumer (Perse, 2001). A few people are heavily affected, a larger number modestly affected, while many others are not affected at all. While these effects can be moderated by the prior knowledge of the viewer (Petty, et al., 2002), a very important moderator is the level of media literacy in the viewer (Johnson, 2001).
Media literacy involves the skill of questioning, appraising, and processing media, whether video, audio, or print. The area of media literacy that most directly utilizes cognition is the stage of analyzing and asking questions about the message. According to Johnson (2001), once consumers interpret the meaning of a media message, the media-literate among them may then use metacognitive skills to determine why the interpretation process led to that specific meaning, including such factors as understanding the use of stereotypes and the motivations of the producers. This may involve reflecting on the message while examining it from multiple perspectives, all of which are clearly central, as opposed to peripheral, processing in the sense of the Elaboration Likelihood model (Petty, et al., 2002). For example, Sagarin, Cialdini, Rice, and Serna (2002) found that providing short training to participants might enable them to judge the persuasiveness of authority appeals based on whether the authority has a legitimate reason to provide information about the product. Participants receiving the training rated illegitimate spokesmodels as less persuasive than did participants in the control group. This result was enhanced when participants were shown that they themselves could fall prey to these types of appeals.
Because the media use framing and other techniques to set their agenda, consumers must develop a certain degree of media literacy in order to discover that agenda and fully comprehend the information appearing in the media. This learning process must occur for each source the consumer uses, in order to allow for full comprehension of both the new information and the agendas behind it (Cohen, 1963). For example, if a regular viewer of Fox News suddenly turns to CNN instead, she will experience a transition period before completely understanding which issues, and which viewpoints on those issues i.e., its agenda, are given the most weight on the new channel.
See Potter (2001) for a thorough discussion of various aspects of media literacy.
Case Study of Media Literacy: Misleading Advertising
One public policy media literacy issue clearly amenable to cognitive research is the question of deceptive, or misleading, advertising. If consumers construct a meaning of an ad that is at variance with the facts, they are deceived or misled (Burke, DeSarbo, Oliver, & Robertson, 1988; Harris, Dubitsky, & Bruno, 1983; Richards, 1990). Determining whether an ad is misleading is not the same as assessing its literal truth. The truth of a claim may be resolved by examining reality. Misleadingness, however, is a function of the understanding of the consumer. It is thus a cognitive question and must be inferred from an assessment of a person’s understanding of an ad. Some blatantly false statements in ads are unlikely to mislead anyone (“Our cookies are made by elves in a tree”; “at these prices the cars will fly out the door”).
On the other hand, advertising that makes only true statements may mislead when the consumer is led to infer unsubstantiated claims about a product that were never explicitly stated. Several different types of linguistic constructions may mislead without actually lying by inviting the consumer to infer beyond the information stated. One common class of true-but-potentially-misleading claims are hedge words (e.g., may, could help), which weaken a claim without denying it, e.g., “Scrubble Shampoo may help get rid of dandruff symptoms,” or “Rainbow Toothpaste fights plaque.” Another common manner of implying false information is the elliptical comparative, e.g., “Fibermunchies have more vitamin C,” or “Powderpower laundry detergent cleans better,” without stating the standard to which the product is being compared.
A causal relationship may be implied when no more than a correlational one in fact exists, as in the juxtaposition of two imperatives (“Help your child excel in school. Buy an Apricot home computer” or “Shed those extra pounds. Buy the Blubberbuster massage belt.”) In neither case does the ad state that buying the product will have the desired effect, but the causal inference is easy to draw. Something unfavorable may be implied about a competitor’s products or services, without stating so directly. For example, consumers may infer from statements like “If we do your taxes and you are audited by the IRS, we will accompany you to the audit” or “Our company gives refunds quickly if your traveler’s checks are lost or stolen” that the competing companies do not provide the same service, whereas in fact they do.
Incomplete reporting of scientific evidence may also imply more than what is stated. For example, “Three out of four doctors recommended Zayer Aspirin” would not be false if only four people were questioned. Claiming that “2,000 dentists recommended brushing with Laser Fluoride” without reporting the sample size is also potentially misleading. Our minds fill in the missing information in ways favorable to the advertiser (Harris et al., 1983). Comparison advertising may employ very selective attribute comparisons to imply a much more global impression. For example, “The Egret Pistol has more front-seat leg room than a Dodge Intrepid, more rear-seat headroom than a Nissan Maxima, and a larger trunk than a Toyota Camry” may imply that the car has a more spacious interior on most or all dimensions than any of the competitors.
In experimental studies, people do in fact make the inferences described and remember the inferred information as having been stated in the ad (e.g., remembering that a toothpaste prevents cavities when the ad only said it fights cavities). This stable finding occurs with a variety of dependent measures and is increasingly strong with longer retention intervals between exposure to the ad and the memory test (Burke, et al., 1988; Gardner & Leonard, 1990; Harris, Pounds, Maiorelle, & Mermis, 1993; Harris, Trusty, Bechtold, & Wasinger, 1989; Russo, Metcalf, & Stevens, 1981). Training people not to make such inferences is difficult, because the tendency to infer beyond given information is very strong. However, training participants to individually analyze ads, identify potential unwarranted inferences, and rewrite ads to imply something more or less strongly, has some positive effect in teaching them to put a brake on this natural inference-drawing activity (Bruno & Harris, 1980). Such research has direct implication for media literacy programs.
Conclusion
As this chapter has shown, cognitive processes affect and are affected by one’s experience with the media. As the media becomes more technologically advanced and pervasive, researchers must continue to examine the possible effects of those media on consumers. Examining how consumers attend to, comprehend, remember, evaluate, and act upon the information presented in the media will provide greater understanding of the effects of all types of media. One area of research that holds promise in this area is media literacy. Although the potential exists for positive benefits from the media (e.g. learning about and understanding people with whom one has no contact), there is also the danger of negative effects (e.g. learning incorrect information). As former Federal Communications Commissioner Nicholas Johnson said many years ago in reference to television, “All television is educational. The only question is, ‘What is it teaching?’” (Liebert & Schwartzberg, 1977, p. 170).
Reference Note
Thanks are expressed to Stephan Lewandowsky, Tuan Tran, Nicole Peck, Kristen Geri, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Correspondence may be addressed to rjharris@k-state.edu.
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