Page 156 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

6. SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION 145

choose to do so, and how well they maintain the changes they have
achieved.
The influential role of people’s beliefs in their personal efficacy in social
diffusion is shown in their response to health communications aimed at
altering health-impairing habits. Meyerowitz and Chaiken (1987) exam-
ined four alternative mechanisms through which health communications
could alter health habits—by transmission of factual information, fear
arousal, change in risk perception, and enhancement of perceived self-
efficacy. They found that health communications fostered adoption of pre-
ventive health practices primarily by their effects on perceived self-
efficacy. Beck and Lund (1981) have similarly shown that preventive
health practices are better promoted by heightening self-efficacy than by
elevating fear. Analyses of how communitywide media campaigns pro-
duce changes reveal that both the preexisting and induced level of per-
ceived self-efficacy play an influential role in the adoption and social dif-
fusion of health practices (Maibach, Flora, & Nass, 1991; Slater, 1989). The
stronger the preexisting perceived self-efficacy and the more the media
campaigns enhance people’s beliefs in their self-regulative efficacy, the
more likely they are to adopt the recommended practices. Health knowl-
edge gets translated into healthful habits through the mediation of per-
ceived self-efficacy (Rimal, 2000).
The findings just reviewed underscore the need to shift the emphasis
from trying to scare people into healthy behavior to empowering them with
the tools and self-beliefs for exercising personal control over their health
habits. People must also experience sufficient success using what they have
learned to become convinced of their efficacy and the functional value of
what they have adopted. This is best achieved by combining modeling with
guided mastery, in which newly acquired skills are first tried under condi-
tions likely to produce good results and then extended to more unpre-
dictable and difficult circumstances (Bandura, 1986, 2000a).

Adoption Determinants

The acquisition of knowledge and skills regarding innovations is necessary
but not sufficient for their adoption in practice. A number of factors deter-
mine whether people will act on what they have learned. Environmental
inducements serve as one set of regulators. Adoptive behavior is also
highly susceptible to incentive influences, which may take the form of
material, social, or self-evaluative outcomes. Some of the motivating incen-
tives derive from the utility of the adoptive behavior. The greater the rela-
tive benefits provided by an innovation, the higher is the incentive to adopt
it (Ostlund, 1974; Rogers & Shoemaker, 1971). However, benefits cannot be
experienced until the new practices are tried. Promoters, therefore, strive to