The audience
6.3 The audience
The earliest experiments in measuring the effects of the mass media took place in the USA in the 1930s, and specifically investigated the influence of film and radio. These studies applied a behaviourist approach, and used scientific methods to identify specific events. They investigated the influences of the media on behaviour, emotions, attitudes and knowledge. What is peculiar to behaviourist research is not so much the particular kinds of
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effects studied, but the methods used. These included experimental research, done in the controlled environment of a laboratory, and survey research, using representative, random or stratified samples of audiences – assessing media in the field. Researchers employing these methods were convinced that they were producing hard evidence about the effects of the mass media. This conviction was based upon the belief that only scientific methods were capable of discovering the facts about the power of the media.
In the USA, the Paine Foundation Studies (1929–1932) were the first significant theories or surveys. These evaluated the influence of film on children. Thirteen studies were published in 10 volumes, focusing on audience composition and content analysis of themes. It was the classical conditioning experiment that fired the imagination of the psychologists involved in these studies. The experiments relied heavily on the distinctive S and R (stimulus and response) theory made popular by the physiologists Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir Bekhterev. This introduced the idea of association and signification, and described the learning process in terms of the Black Box theory. This proposed the view that to measure a change of attitude by the influence of an external source, the relationship between the stimulus input and the response output should be assessed and a hypothesis formulated about what was going on in the box. This hypothesis was assumed to indicate a psychological change in the subject. These studies investigated six paradigms of audience response:
1 Propaganda persuasion – the effects of moulding the attitude, called a
soft modification, and changing behaviour, called a hard modification.
2 Imitation – the effects of copying what is received. This is particularly important in research done with children.
3 Desensitisation – the effect of dulling sensitivities.
4 Escapism – the effect of creating a fantasy world; the defunctioning effect of the media.
5 Reality construction – the effect of the media explaining the world.
6 Agenda setting – the effect of the media establishing the importance of the subject.
Patterson and Thurlston carried out one of the major experiments sponsored by the Paine Fund. They employed a range of techniques to isolate the influence of selected films upon a group of children of similar cultural background. Applying the stimulus response theory, and making the assumption that few extraneous influences affected the children between the pre-screening and post-screening tests, they concluded that any
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differences of attitudes recorded were a direct result of watching the film. Thurlston devised a scale with which to measure the attitude of the subjects. These were given to each member of the audience before they saw the film, and the results of the group were computed to give an indication of their combined attitude to a number of points. The following day, the scale was given again and the new position of the group computed. Any response higher than the original figure represented a negative shift and a lower figure a positive shift in the attitude of the group to the subject. A test was given at various periods after the screening to enable the permanence of the changes to be assessed. The extensive developments used 4000 subjects selected from mostly junior or high school age groups. Between 600 and 800 films were reviewed, and 13 were selected as being most likely to produce a noticeable change in attitude. The popular films dealt with such subjects as the Chinese (Son of God), war (All Quiet on the Western Front) and black issues ( the D. W. Griffith film, The Birth of a Nation). The experiments took place in small towns around Chicago so as to enable a selection of films that children were not likely to have seen.
The results of these experiments suggested that films could affect information acquisition, modify cultural attitudes, stimulate emotions and disturb sleep. At the time, it was thought that the outstanding contribution of the study was the setting of the attitude of children towards social values, which could be immeasurably changed by exposure to one film. A second fact discovered during these attitude studies was the cumulative effects, which demonstrated that the influence of two or more films with similar themes was much greater than the effect of a single film. It also appeared to show that the shifts created by exposure to the films had a long-term effect. The Patterson and Thurlston studies did not specifically investigate the effects of film on behaviour, but the assumption made was that because information was a factor in behaviour and film was influential in imparting information, then there was a connection between the two. W. Charters
said 1 : We may assume that attitudes towards social objects affect conduct. If
one is friendly toward an objective of action in a situation, he will be influenced to build one behaviour pattern; if unfriendly to build another.
Other surveys of the time used the more real life approach of field studies. One such study 2 carried out by Herbert Blumer used an autobiographical technique supplemented by interviews, accounts of conversations and questionnaires and a wide spectrum of society. Blumer went to great lengths
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to achieve error-free results. He explained that the comparison of large numbers of documents coming from different groups of people with no knowledge of each other made it possible to ascertain the general run of experiences. He went on to say that the content of the documents coming from different sources yielded substantially the same general kind of experience. Charters substantiates this point by saying that the mass and
consistency of this project proves the validity of the conclusion 3 . One of the significant points made by Blumer was the elaboration of the phenomenon of emotional possession, during which a child watching in the darkness of the cinema sees the actors and actions of a film as being part of the real world. His emotional condition may get such a strong grip on him that even his efforts to rid himself of it by reasoning may prove to little avail. They also demonstrated how films stimulate a wide range of emotions, including fright, sorrow, love and excitement, and give children techniques of actions in situations of interest to them, ranging from the trivial techniques of the playground to disturbing cues for the delinquent. This childhood state is finally altered by what Blumer describes as emotional detachment, when young people at first affected sophisticated detachment from serial thrillers and then showed genuine dislike of them. The outcome of the Paine Fund studies was to reinforce existing public concern and lead to an industry self- censorship system that lasted in the USA until the 1960s. As should be expected, differences in design methodology and manipulation of the data have produced some disagreement among researchers. The major criticisms of the behaviourist studies were:
䊉 an objection to the assumption that the audience was composed of individuals who operated in self-contained isolation rather than in
complex relationships 䊉 that the experiments were unrealistic in the sense that subjects
responded knowing that their views were part of an experiment, and therefore the results measured what tended to be unnatural and unrepresentative attitudes.
These film studies had begun to acknowledge the variable nature of the media product, the media audience and the environment in which the media are consumed. The behaviourist surveys of the 1930s raised a range of assertions about the power of the mass media, which were questioned by researchers who took a broader sociological view of mass society and mass media. Theirs was a pluralistic perspective. They felt that the previous surveys did not make adequate allowances for the complex set of factors that act upon the process of media influence. They were concerned with the understanding of the effects of those variables in society that acted as filters
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on the reception of the media messages. These act on the reception of the message, and fall into four categories; informational, physical, psychological and cultural. Filters or conditions are ways in which we learn or are trained to receive or ignore messages. A number of subsequent works – namely the Invasion from Mars survey, which studied the effects of the Orson Welles’ radio broadcast The War of the Worlds; the Peoples Choice study, which analysed voting predispositions in the American 1914 presidential elections; and the war time study Why we Fight – focused on some of the variables at work in the process of mass media communication.
In his hastily compiled study Invasion from Mars, Hadley Cantril regarded as causal any psychological condition in the listener or the listening situation that endangered and sustained the belief that the broadcast was news. He
continued 4 : We have seen that a variety of influences and conditions are related to
the panic resulting from this particular broadcast. We have found no single observable variable consistently related to the reaction although
a lack of critical ability seemed particularly conducive to fear in a large proportion of the population.
The study also concluded that the excellent quality of the production and the point at which people joined the audience contributed to the reaction. It was found that individuals with weak personalities, low educational levels and strong religious beliefs were most susceptible to panic, and that, once frightened, people stopped listening altogether or would not believe all was well despite other stations being on the air. The political tension in Europe and the depressed economy was said to have created cultural conditions that contributed to the overall panic. Cantril acknowledges that this field study does not give a strictly behaviourist explanation of the panic engendered, and suggests the absence of conditioning as an explanation. However, he explains, the particular accounting relationships we have given to a greater subsumptive power in conceptualising the rich and varied experiences we have dealt with in this very realistic phenomenon of our
social life 4 . The Peoples Choice was the first to use the tools of the social scientist on a large-scale field study, and found that political propaganda activated voters to remain loyal to their political beliefs rather than change them. Variables such as religion, socio-economic status, age, occupation and urban versus rural residence were also identified as important. The study suggested that media content moves through a two-step flow, in which opinion leaders influence less active information seekers and these interpersonal social contacts are more important than exposure to the
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media. It was the concern for the effects that the variables had on the influence of the mass media that initiated the pluralist studies. In the words
of Blumer and Gurevitsch 2 : Pluralists see mass society as a polarity of potential concentrations of
power, albeit not necessarily equal to each other, which are engaged in
a contest for ascendancy and dominance. The mass media within this view can be seen as a stage on which this
contest is conducted and the public support for one or another grouping or point of view is mobilised 2 . The identification of the variables has major effects on media influence, and has been the cause of criticism of the approach. Most pluralists would list four primary sets of variables:
4 Interaction. Nonetheless, many variables and combinations of variables remain. The
problem is expressed by Richard Dembo 5 : When the magnifying power of our social microscope is increased one
does not find people acting as alienated automatons in an enormous social universe, but as persons with definite set ties of sentiment and shared experience on the premise of mutual trust. Each individual is seen as being his own kind of social scientist, going about and organising a world that is meaningful to him.
He was working in the 1970s on the effects of television on teenage boys, and poses the view that each subject uses and gains gratification from the medium of television in terms of the variables each brings to bear on the material he views. Opposing this pluralist perspective were George Gerbner and Larry Gross, who asserted that television is the central cultural arm of American society. It is an agency of the established order, and as such serves primarily to extend and maintain rather than alter or weaken conventional conceptions, beliefs and behaviours. Its chief cultural function is to spread and stabilise social patterns, and to cultivate not change, but resistance to change. Television is a medium of socialisation of most people into standardised roles and behaviours. Its function is, in a word,
‘enculturation’ 6 . This critical or dominant approach reflects the view that critical theorists see the audience as dependent, passive and organised on a large scale, and vulnerable to very powerful ideological effects that confirm the established social order. This view has its followers in Britain, who
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believed that only by taking a theoretical perspective based on ideology could the media be understood. In 1948, Bernard Berelson attempted to summarise the status of the fields of research into the effects of the mass media as it then existed. He noted that the older stimulus response theory of the all-powerful media had largely been abandoned, and he identified five
central factors that seemed to be a guide to new directions of research 7 . In the 1940s a body of empirical research began to accumulate which
provides some refined knowledge on the effect of communication on public opinion, and promises to provide a good deal more in the next few years. But what has such research contributed to the problem? The proper answer to the general question, the answer that constitutes the most useful formulation for research purposes, is this: some kind of communication on some kind of issues brought to the attention of some kinds of people under some kinds of conditions had some kinds of effects.
In spite of its simplicity, this serves as a guide for new directions of research and still is the kind of general statement of the salient categories, factors and variables which, along with individual differences, must be considered in trying to understand the effect of the media on society. All the methods used during the last 60 years to analyse the effects of the media have shown apparent contradictions when put into the context of the society to which they are applied. The behaviourist method depended on the scientific approach, which ignored the variables influencing the effects of media. The pluralist method reflected the balance of forces within society, but ignored the extent to which the weaker and unorganised groups are excluded from the process altogether – although it is the pluralist method that leads back into the determinist explanation of the real or supposed role of the media as an instrument of class domination. The determinist method, in terms of class manipulation and exploitation, is too mechanistic, and obscures the series of complex relationships, which have not yet been explained.