Page 101 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

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involvement, it has been my experience that a majority of the college stu-
dents that comprise subject pools seem to be in quite a hurry to finish
their task and leave. Moreover, within any type of data collection method,
some people will be in more of a hurry than others, whether because of
individual (e.g., personality) or situational (e.g., family duties) factors.

All of the Above. The point in discussing all of these explanations is
that there are many factors that may contribute to reducing or eliminating
the cultivation effect, and any or all may be at work at any time that a
judgment is required. In fact, as one thinks of all the possibilities, it may
seem surprising that we would ever observe a cultivation effect! Yet, that is
one point of the model: Across studies, the cultivation effect tends to be
rather small (McGuire, 1986; Morgan & Shanahan, 1996), and this may be
largely explained by various conditions that may operate at the time of
judgment.

When Cultivation? Generally speaking, one would expect (larger)
cultivation effects when people process heuristically rather than system-
atically. Put differently, cultivation effects are expected when people do
not give much thought to their judgments. But does that make the culti-
vation effect trivial? We know that judgments made through heuristic
processing tend to be less persistent, less resistant to change, and less pre-
dictive of behavior than those made via systematic processing (Chaiken et
al., 1989; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), and thus relatively inferior in terms of
quality. Yet, people make heuristic judgments all the time. Examples
might include providing opinions for pollsters, voting decisions when lit-
tle is known about a candidate, whether to avoid someone on a street, or
how to react in a dangerous situation. In fact, as research in social cogni-
tion accumulates, it is remarkable as to how little information is used in
the course of constructing judgments and how often heuristics are
employed (Wyer & Srull, 1989). Moreover, recent work suggests that
much of this process is automatic rather than controlled (Bargh & Char-
trand, 1999).

CONCLUSION

The purpose of this chapter was to make a case for the importance of
investigating the cognitive processes underlying media effects. This was
accomplished in two ways: first, by providing a discussion of some gen-
eral principles that have emerged from social cognition research, and how
the principles can be used to explain particular media effects, and second,
by demonstrating how these general principles can be used to develop a