Page 153 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

142 BANDURA

changes to fruition (Bandura, 2000c). In the population-based approaches
the communications are designed to inform, enable, motivate, and guide
people to effect personal and social changes. In implementing the social
linking function, communications media can connect people to interactive
online self-management programs that provide intensive individualized
guidance in their homes when they want it (Bandura, 2000d; Taylor,
Winzelberg, & Celio, 2001).
In short, there is no single pattern of social influence. The media can
implant ideas either directly or through adopters. Analyses of the role of
mass media in social diffusion must distinguish between their effect on
learning modeled activities and on their adoptive use and examine how
media and interpersonal influences affect these separable processes. In
some instances the media both teach new forms of behavior and create
motivators for action by altering people’s value preferences, efficacy
beliefs, outcome expectations, and perception of opportunity structures. In
other instances, the media teach but other adopters provide the incentive
motivation to perform what has been learned observationally. In still other
instances, the effect of the media may be entirely socially mediated. That is,
people who have had no exposure to the media are influenced by adopters
who have had the exposure and then, themselves, become the transmitters
of the new ways. Within these different patterns of social influence, the
media can serve as originating, as well as reinforcing, influences.
The hierarchical pattern is more likely to obtain for the print media,
which has a more limited audience, than for the ubiquitous video media.
Communication technologies and global interconnectedness provide peo-
ple with ready direct access to information worldwide independent of
time and place and unfettered by institutional and moneyed gatekeepers.
The public is less dependent on a mediated filter-down system of persua-
sion and enlightenment. These vastly expanded opportunities for self-
directedness underscore the growing primacy of agentic initiative in
human adaptation and change in the electronic era (Bandura, 1997,
2000d). Ready access to communication technologies will not necessarily
enlist active participation unless people believe that they can achieve
desired results by this means. Perceived personal and collective efficacy
partly determines the extent to which people use this resource and the
purposes to which they put it.

SOCIAL DIFFUSION THROUGH SYMBOLIC MODELING

Much of the preceding discussion has been concerned mainly with mod-
eling at the individual level. As previously noted, a unique property of
modeling is that it can transmit information of virtually limitless variety