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Cultivation Theory
Cultivation theory, developed by George Gerbner and his colleagues, proposes that heavy television viewing contributes to beliefs about the real world. The more television people watch, the more their beliefs and assumptions about life and society will tend to be congruent with television's most stable and repetitive messages.
The theory of cultivation emphasizes the role that storytelling plays in the process of socialization. Stories—from myths and legends to soap operas and cop shows—tend to express, define, and sustain (i.e., cultivate) a culture's central assumptions, expectations, values, and interpretations of social reality. Much of what we know, or think we know, comes not from personal or direct experience but from many forms and modes of storytelling. In earlier times, cultural stories were told face to face by members of a community, parents, teachers, or the clergy. Today, television is the dominant storyteller. Television's stories must fit into and reflect—and thereby sustain and cultivate—the “facts” of life that most people take for granted.
Cultivation is part of the cultural indicators paradigm, which follows a three-pronged research strategy. The first step, institutional process analysis, investigates the pressures and constraints under which media messages are selected, produced, and distributed. The second, message system analysis, systematically monitors the most stable images and recurrent portrayals in television content. The third, cultivation analysis, explores whether and how television viewing contributes to audience members' conceptions of social reality.
Findings from message system analyses of television's content are used to formulate questions about social reality, often contrasting television's “reality” with some other, real-world criterion. Using standard techniques of survey methodology, the questions are posed to samples of children, adolescents, or adults, and the differences (if any) in the beliefs of light, medium, and heavy viewers, other things held constant, are assessed.
Long-Term Systemic Effects
Before cultivation theory was developed in the late 1960s, most studies of media effects looked at whether individual messages or programs could produce some kind of change in audience attitudes or behaviors, typically in an experimental context. These studies looked for immediate effects following exposure to a single message or stimulus. In contrast, cultivation theory sees television as a coherent system of messages—a symbolic environment—and asks whether that system as a whole might promote long-term changes rather than immediate change in individuals. Cultivation thus focuses on the cumulative consequences of television exposure, not on short-term responses to or individual interpretations of content.
Early cultivation research was concerned with the issue of violence. Whereas most research on television violence explored whether violent portrayals make viewers more aggressive, Gerbner and his colleagues tested the hypothesis that heavy exposure to television cultivates exaggerated beliefs about the amount of violence in society. Over the years, the investigation expanded to include sex roles, images of aging, political orientations, environmental attitudes, images of science, health, religion, minorities, occupations, and many other topics.
The consistent overrepresentation of well-off white males pervades prime time. Women are outnumbered by men at a rate of three to one and have a narrower range of activities and opportunities. Members of the dominant white male group are more likely to commit violence, whereas old, young, female, and minority characters are more likely to be victims. Crime in prime time is at least 10 times as rampant as in the real world, and an average of five to six acts of overt physical violence per hour involve well over half of all major characters.
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- Contraceptive Advertising
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- Electronic Games, Gender and
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- Food Advertising, Gender, Ethnicity, and Age
- Gender Identity Development
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- Gender, Media Use and
- Hip Hop, Female Performers of
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- Internet Use, Gender and
- Magazines, Adolescent Boys'
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- Music Listening, Gender Effects on
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- Schemas/Scripts, Gender
- Schemas/Scripts, Sexual
- Sex in Television, Content Analysis of
- Sex in Television, Incidence and Themes
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- Sex, Media Impact on
- Sexual Content, Age and Comprehension of
- Sexual Information, Internet and
- Sexual Information, Teen Magazines and
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- Adult Mediation Strategies
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- Interactive Media
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- Media Effects
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- Natural Experiments, Impact on Community Activities
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- Peer Groups, Impact of Media on
- Physiological Arousal
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- Asia, Media Use in
- Bedrooms, Media Use in
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- China, Media Use in
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- Gender, Media Use and
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- TV-Turnoff Week
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- Child-Centered vs. Media-Centered Perspectives
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- Cuing and Priming
- Cultivation Theory
- Desensitization Effects
- Displacement Effect
- Excitation-Transfer Theory
- Externalizing Behavior
- Forbidden Fruit Hypothesis
- Formal Features
- General Aggression Model (GAM)
- Information Processing, Active vs. Passive Models of
- Interactivity
- Intertextuality
- Mean World Syndrome
- Media Practice Model
- Message Interpretation Process Model
- Physiological Arousal
- Priming Theory
- Schema Theory
- Schemas/Scripts, Aggressive
- Schemas/Scripts, Gender
- Schemas/Scripts, Sexual
- Selective Exposure
- Selectivity
- Social Class
- Social Learning Theory/Social Cognitive Theory
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- Super-Peer Theory
- Third-Person Effect
- Uses and Gratifications Theory
- Violence and Aggression
- Adult Mediation of Violence Effects
- Aggression, Advertising and
- Aggression, Electronic Games and
- Aggression, Movies and
- Aggression, Music and
- Aggression, Music Videos and
- Aggression, Television and
- Cartoons, Violence in
- Desensitization Effects
- Electronic Games, Violence in
- Fear Reactions
- General Aggression Model (GAM)
- Hip Hop, Violence in
- Movies, Violence in
- Music, Impact of Violence in
- Schemas/Scripts, Aggressive
- Sexualized Violence
- Television Violence
- Television Violence, Susceptibility to
- UNESCO Violence Study
- V-Chip (Violence Chip)
- Violence, Desensitization Toward
- Violence, Effects of
- Violence, Experimental Studies of
- Violence, Extent of and Responses to
- Violence, Historical Trends and
- Violence, Industry Stance on
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- World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)
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