Page 49 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

38 ZILLMANN

Effects of Attentional Enhancement

The implications for issue perception of attentional focus on particular
exemplars of an exemplar series have been explored for printed news by
Gibson and Zillmann (1993, 1998). In their investigations, disproportional
attention to specific exemplars of a series, and thereby more careful pro-
cessing of the specific exemplars, was accomplished by presenting asser-
tions as personal utterances. Attention was drawn by letting people speak
for themselves, simply by placing their statements in quotation marks. In
the control condition, their statements were paraphrased and presented
as a third-person report.
In the 1998 experiment, poor and rich farmers were interviewed in an
article about the economic prospects of farming. In one version, the poor
farmers reported their plight in quotes, whereas the rich farmers’
accounts of their success were paraphrased. In the counterversion, the
rich farmers related their good fortunes in quotes, whereas the poor farm-
ers’ demise was presented in third-person format.
The results were unequivocal. When poor farmers were quoted, the
incidence of money-losing farms and of farms going into bankruptcy
was, relative to the countercondition, overestimated. Analogously, when
the rich farmers were quoted, the incidence of profitable and wealth-
generating farms was overestimated. The exemplified condition that was
given the attentional advantage, then, was consistently overestimated.
Such findings are clearly supportive of the initial part of Prediction 6
as based on Assumption 3 and the representativeness heuristic. The lat-
ter part, concerning effect shifts over time, cannot be evaluated at pres-
ent, however, as the reported research did not involve delayed effect
assessments.

EPILOGUE

Exemplification theory of media influence has, no doubt, garnered a con-
siderable amount of evidence in its support. The theory and the research it
generated, counter to likely impressions from the sampling of explo-
rations reported here, are by no means limited to the influence of the
news, however. Much research has been conducted on the influence of
exemplification in media entertainment, and numerous findings in this
domain of media influence are also consistent with exemplification theory
(cf. Zillmann & Brosius, 2000; Zillmann & Vorderer, 2000). Exemplification
theory thus may be considered a media-influence theory of broad scope.
However, although exemplification research is burgeoning, many
aspects of the theory remain untested. Predictions 2 and 5, for instance,