Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Media Effects Theories

Media effects theories are, in essence, an umbrella term for intertwined research areas regarding the study of media audiences and effects. Although there have been disagreements about the development of the approaches and what aspects of study need to be highlighted, three main bodies of research can be extracted as the key conceptual ideas about the effects of media. They can be understood as periods in time, marked by a paradigm shift about the impact media have on audiences.

In general, the study of media effects has a history that traces its origin to late 19th-century crowd theories or mass society research. Being open to mass-communicated media influences was seen as the result of the loss of traditional institutions of authority of family, church, and state in a society that focused intensely on individuality. Understanding this irrational behavior of a mass audience became a means for early media psychology research to ascertain the kind of satisfaction audiences derive from media use.

Period 1: Direct Effects Models

This period encompasses work in the early 20th century, roughly ending in the 1930s. Drawn from stimulus-response models from psychology, the view of the mass audience was pessimistic. With the anonymous mass replacing the community, the media were said to have enormous power to which the isolated, anonymous members of this mass audience would succumb immediately. The hypodermic needle theory or magic bullet theory expressed the original concept of the effects of media. It contended that (a) technical advances and mass production of popular culture have created a mass audience focusing on the same messages, and (b) powerful stimuli elicit an immediate, mechanical and uniform response, compatible with the sender's intentions. In other words, once the message hits or is injected into the audience, it will exert its powerful influences on everyone who processes it.

The emergence of mass broadcasting media, such as radio, motion pictures, and later television, reinforced the beliefs of media overpowering the audience, although they found support more through real-life anecdotal evidence than scientific research. For instance, on October 30, 1938 (the night before Halloween), Orson Welles, through his Mercury Theater of the Air, produced and narrated a radio adaptation of the science fiction story “War of the Worlds” and created with it a mass hysteria in the country, as people thought the nation was really under attack by creatures from Mars. A subsequent study conducted by a research team from Princeton University found that, while the impact of the program differed by specific audience factors, by and large most Americans had tremendous trust and confidence in the media. Since the theoretical framework for differences in audience response was nonexistent at the time, little consideration was given to factors that might have unearthed differences.

Period 2: Limited Effects Models

In 1940, researchers from Columbia University engaged in a massive project about the role of radio messages on voter behavior. The so-called The People's Choice study by Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet shifted the perception of powerful effects of media to one in which the media were seen as having only minimal influences on the audience. In 1958, Joseph Klapper, a communication consultant and chief spokesperson for this new paradigm, published an influential book in which he argued that the effects of media were negligible.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution