Sometimes, after watching hours of news and crime dramas every night, the world somehow feels like a rougher place. Your actual neighborhood is no different from yesterday, yet you check the front door one more time and become a little more wary of strangers. Even though we know the stories on screen are made up, as they pile up, the way we see the world gradually changes. Media studies explains this phenomenon with “Cultivation Theory.”
Put simply, cultivation theory holds that the more heavily and the longer people are exposed to media such as television, the more they come to believe that the real world resembles the picture the media presents. It is called the “cultivation” effect because, rather than a single program changing people's minds right away, similar stories repeated over a long time slowly cultivate the foundation of their thinking.
This article walks step by step through the background in which cultivation theory emerged, its research methods, the differences between people who watch a lot and those who watch little, the two processes known as mainstreaming and resonance, and finally the criticisms of the theory and its significance today.
The Principles and Debates of Cultivation Theory
Gerbner, Television Research, and Cultural Indicators
Cultivation theory came out of research led by George Gerbner, who was dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. As concern about television violence grew in American society in the late 1960s, Gerbner launched the “Cultural Indicators” project, a long-term study of how television affects people's thinking. In 1976, together with Larry Gross, he published the paper “Living with Television,” establishing the framework of the theory. Cultural Indicators research consists of three kinds of analysis.
(1) Institutional Process Analysis
Examines the processes through which broadcasters and the production environment create and air programs.
(2) Message System Analysis
Collects the programs actually broadcast each year and counts how elements such as the frequency of violent scenes and the occupations and genders of characters are portrayed.
(3) Cultivation Analysis
Surveys viewers to determine how much the images repeated on television are reflected in the way viewers see reality.
Heavy Viewers and Light Viewers
The core of cultivation analysis is comparing the answers of people who watch a lot of television (Heavy Viewers) with those who watch little (Light Viewers). Studies often classified people who watch more than four hours a day as the heavy-viewing group and those who watch less than two hours as the light-viewing group. When people with similar characteristics, such as age, education, and income, are compared, the size of the gap between the two groups' answers is called the “Cultivation Differential.”
The surveys found that the more people watched, the more they overestimated their own chances of becoming involved in a crime and the less they tended to trust others. Gerbner called this attitude of seeing the world as more dangerous and heartless than it really is “Mean World Syndrome.” Later researchers have also divided the cultivation effect into two levels.
- First-Order Cultivation: the media's influence on people's estimates of numbers and facts about the world, such as crime rates or the share of people working in particular occupations.
- Second-Order Cultivation: the media's influence on attitudes and values, such as the belief that the world is dangerous or that people are hard to trust.
Mainstreaming and Resonance: How Views Converge
In a 1980 study, Gerbner and his colleagues explained how the cultivation effect works with two concepts.
- Mainstreaming: the phenomenon in which people whose views originally differed by region, class, or political leaning come to converge on similar views the more television they watch. As people watch the same stories together, society's overall outlook gathers into a single stream.
- Resonance: the phenomenon in which the effect becomes stronger when what appears on screen matches what viewers have actually experienced. For example, when someone who lives in a neighborhood with frequent crime watches a lot of crime scenes, reality and the screen amplify each other and the anxiety grows deeper.
Thanks to these two concepts, cultivation theory moved beyond the simple claim that “watching a lot always affects you” and became able to explain that the effect also varies with the circumstances viewers find themselves in.
Criticisms and Significance Today
As widely used as it is, cultivation theory has also drawn a great deal of criticism. In 1980, sociologist Paul Hirsch reanalyzed the same data and pointed out that when several factors are taken into account at once, the cultivation effect shrinks considerably or disappears. Critics also argued that it is hard to separate cause and effect: do people fear the world because they watch a lot of television, or do people who are already fearful stay home and watch more television? Another limitation often cited is that the theory looks only at viewing time without considering differences between genres or programs.
Nevertheless, a 1997 meta-analysis that pooled about 20 years of research found that, although the effect is small, it appears consistently across many studies. Today researchers are extending the theory beyond television to video streaming services, games, and social media, because recommendation feeds that endlessly show similar content can create an environment in which cultivation effects readily occur. In everyday life, the following habits can help reduce this effect.
- Watch a variety (Media Diet): Rather than sticking to a single genre or channel, consume a balanced mix of different kinds of content.
- Check the numbers (Fact Check): When the world feels like it has become more dangerous, check what is really going on with official statistics or reliable sources.
- Experience it yourself (Real Experience): Judge the world by conversations with your neighbors and your own firsthand experience rather than by images on a screen.
The habit of telling apart the world painted by our screens from the real world is the first step toward becoming a wise viewer who is not tamed by the media.
