Media Effects, History of Research on

Since the study of media effects began during World War I, several different theories have served as the conceptual framework for this research. In the early days of scientific effects studies, many social critics assumed powerful and uniform media effects. In part, this was because of the historical bias in the popular press toward chronicling instances of powerful media effects. But some aspects of these assumptions about powerful effects reflected the prominence of stimulusresponse models in psychology, and others emerged because of widespread public uncertainty and concern about the social and psychological impact of the new mass media, especially on children and adolescents. After the Depression, a limited-effects model emerged, ascribing to media consumers the ability to select and evaluate media. Following the 1960s, new perspectives evolved on the mechanisms of media effects, and research began to address cognitive, affective, and physiological effects as well as behavioral effects of media. Recent advances in research tools, statistical modeling, and methodological approaches, along with increased sophistication in theories of child and adolescent development, have combined to give communication scholars more accurate and holistic models of media effects on young media users.

The study of media effects began during World War I, in large part in response to concerns about propaganda spread by the military at home and abroad. Later, critics expressed similar concerns about what were perceived to be incredibly potent advertising and public relations efforts being employed by rapidly expanding corporations that were seen as ruthless and inhumane.

Initially, many social scientists, as well as the public, believed that mass media produced rather uniformly powerful effects on their unsuspecting audiences. This immense and presumably subversive power of media messages on vulnerable audiences was described in various and sundry colorful ways: Mass media supposedly fired messages like dangerous bullets, or injected messages like strong drugs propelled through hypodermic needles. These metaphors gave rise to the bullet or hypodermic needle theories of powerful media effects. Other scholars have labeled these early theoretical models the theory of uniform media influences.

The standard history of media effects research typically attributes the rise of these powerful effects theories to the development of a mass society of fragmented individuals who received similar messages from the mass media of communication. Several early media theorists focused on the dramatic changes taking place in society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the resulting effects on the masses. They noted the importance of mass behavior, which typically was attributed to the urbanization and industrialization of the early 20th century. Urbanization, in [Page 510]turn, allegedly was due primarily to the social factors that detached people from their local cultures and local group settings.

Several early books on mass media were written with an underlying acceptance of the bullet or hypodermic needle theories; that is, they assumed an immense power of mass communication messages over their audiences. These included Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, Harold Lasswell's Propaganda Technique in the World War, and George Bruntz's Allied Propaganda and the Collapse of the German Empire in 1918. The powerful-effects model also undergirded the creation of the influential Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1937–1942), which was devoted to informing the public about propaganda, because of the fear that without critical education about propaganda, democracy could not withstand the onslaught of subversive mass media messages.

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