Cultivation Theory

Background

Cultivation analysis was developed in the 1960s as part of a larger paradigm, called the Cultural Indicators project, which involves a three-pronged research strategy. The first, called institutional process analysis, is designed to examine various power roles in media industries and to analyze the organizational and institutional processes that affect how media messages are selected and produced. The second, called message system analysis, analyzes weekly samples of network programs to track the most common and recurrent images and portrayals in television content over long periods of time. Building on the findings from these first two phases, cultivation analysis then investigates whether and how exposure to television's messages contributes to viewers’ conceptions of social reality.

The theory of cultivation has played a major role in communication research, and nearly 500 scholarly articles have been published relating to the Cultural Indicators project. Early cultivation research focused especially on the issue of television violence, but in later years the research expanded to examine sex roles, images of aging, minorities, occupations, political orientations, environmental attitudes, science, health, religion, and other topics. Replications have been carried out in dozens of other countries, including Argentina, Australia, Hungary, Japan, Sweden, and elsewhere.

Theoretical Framework

The theory of cultivation builds on the vital, lifelong role that storytelling plays in all cultures. Unlike other species, human beings live in a world that is created by the stories we tell. Great portions of what we know (or think we know) are based not on any direct or personal experience, but on stories we have been told.

The stories of any culture tend to reflect (and cultivate) that culture's most basic, fundamental, and often invisible assumptions, ideologies, and [Page 159]values. In any culture, stories—myths, legends, fairy tales, soap operas, cop shows—dynamically express and reproduce a culture's central beliefs about what exists; what is real, normal, good, and bad; and what different types of people can expect in life.

Gerbner defined communication as “interaction through messages.” Mass communication is the mass production, distribution, and consumption of cultural messages and stories. For much of human history, the stories of a culture were transmitted face-to-face by parents, teachers, or the clergy. With the rise of mass media, television in particular, the cultural process of storytelling has become dominated by a centralized, advertiser-sponsored system. Television now tells most of the stories to most of the people, most of the time. Most of the stories we now consume are not handcrafted works of individual expressive artists but are mass-produced by bureaucratic institutions according to strict market specifications. The commercial imperatives of television require it to produce stories that reflect—and thereby sustain and cultivate—the “facts” of life that most people take for granted.

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