How do media affect our thoughts, feelings, and actions?
- Laugh tracks take advantage of conformity - altering behaviors/opinions to match those of others.
- Why?
- You think that other people know the right answer (informational basis)
- To fit in (normative basis)
- Study: watched debate with other people, some vocally pro-Democrat and others vocally pro-Republican. This affects people’s impressions of the debate.
- Another study: on-screen line graphs favor Democrat or Republican. This also sways people’s opinions of the candidates’ performances.
- Examples
- Political attitudes
- Marketing/advertising
- In a study that Facebook performed on their users, emotional content of your Facebook feed affected the emotional sentiment in what people posted.
How accurate are media depictions of psychological issues?
- The best predictor for future behavior is past behavior.
- You need to account for initial behavior when trying to track down a change.
- TV viewing and video game playing are far weaker predictors of attentional problems than past attentional problems.