Cultivation Theory

Cultivation theory is based on the belief that audience behaviors and attitudes are shaped by cumulative exposure to mainstream media, with an emphasis on television as a dominant social force in shaping public opinion. Developed by George Gerbner, the theory contends that perceptions about reality are the result of long-term, cumulative exposure to television. According to the theory, the process of socialization, or “acculturation,” is largely influenced by television as a powerful storytelling medium that encourages viewers who watch it most gradually to accept the worldviews espoused on television as reality. As a result, viewers are encouraged to align their own attitudes, aspirations, and fears [Page 47]with the dominant themes and issues of the television world as they have been shaped and told by mainstream media producers. The hypothesis holds that the more audiences watch television, the more closely aligned their ideas and values are with those of television. Researchers have studied the extent to which television viewing alters the attitudes and behaviors in realms such as violence, politics, health, education, religion, sex roles, age roles, and more. Cultivation theory is particularly relevant to those interested in studying the long-term impact of mass-media exposure on gender attitudes and behaviors. The theory demonstrates the marginalization of women and minorities in television drama and the consistent victimization of women and minorities within the world of television violence.

The methodological approach to cultivation theory involves three main facets: (1) analyzing the institutional approaches that lead to the production of media messages, such as media ownership and production practices; (2) documenting the patterns that emerge from the stories and images that are represented in media content; and (3) correlating message exposure to the formation of audience beliefs and behaviors.

Although cultivation theory cuts across mainstream media genres and forms, research has focused primarily on news and on prime-time and daytime television drama. Television is viewed as an important socializing agent because it cuts across all ages, classes, and groups by offering a streamlined perspective on reality. The underlying reason for emphasizing the power of television over that of other mass media is that audiences continue to spend more time watching television than other media, and that the majority of people's leisure time is spent with this medium. Estimates indicate that on average, a television set is on for more than seven hours a day in the typical American household, and that individual family members consume four hours a day. In addition to its dominance in individual households, television provides the most widespread and influential ideological platform in a given society, thereby serving as a powerful cultivating force for learned attitudes and behaviors. In this regard, television is considered to be an important and persuasive audiovisual medium that reflects and distorts reality through its conventional storytelling. Cultivation theory argues that television's power comes from its ability to present a consistent and unified set of cultural values and norms to a large viewing population.

Given television's importance in shaping attitudes and behaviors, cultivation analysis aims to analyze mass-media effects through a methodology that is different from that employed in other social scientific research. Unlike most effects research, which examines short-term behavioral changes in subjects who are exposed to isolated media messages in a clinical or lab setting, cultivation analysis aims to study the attitudinal and behavioral changes that emerge from cumulative, long-term television exposure within audience members' everyday lives. Whereas “stimulus-response” models of mass-media effects research encourage simple and linear relationships between media content and viewers, cultivation analysis seeks to analyze the cumulative consequences of television exposure in conjunction with the patterns that are representative of television content as a whole. Rather than isolate single programs, messages, episodes, series, or genres to see if they stimulate attitudinal or behavioral change, cultivation analysis analyzes the most recurring and stable patterns in television content by focusing on the themes, values, and issues that are consistently shown across media channels and genres. As such, the theory is predicated on observing consistencies in audience responses, such as maintenance of the status quo, inasmuch as it is interested in documenting shifts in the cultivation of common points of view as they correlate with mass media.

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