Two-Step Flow Model of Communication

The two-step flow model of communication is a theory of limited media effects formulated in 1948 by Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet in the book The People's Choice, after research into voters' decision-making processes during the 1940 U.S. presidential election. The two-step flow model of communication stipulates that mass media content first reaches “opinion leaders,” people who are active media users and who collect, interpret, and diffuse the meaning of media messages to less active media consumers. According to the authors, opinion leaders pick up information from the media, and this information then gets passed on to less active members of the public. This implies that most people receive information from opinion leaders through interpersonal communication rather than directly from mass media, as previously assumed by other theories of mass communication. Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet discovered that most voters in the 1940 election got their information about the candidates from other people who read about the campaign in the newspapers, and not directly from the media. These more informed people became “opinion leaders” who filtered mass media content and passed it on to other people, together with their own interpretation. Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet concluded that word-of-mouth transmission of information plays an important role in the communication process in our society, and mass media have only a limited influence on most individuals.

The theory of the two-step flow of communication reversed the dominant paradigm in mass communication at the time. Before Lazarsfeld's study, it was assumed that mass media have a direct influence on a mass audience who consumed and absorbed media messages. Media were thought to significantly influence people's decisions and behaviors. However, the research done by Lazarsfeld et al. showed that only about 5% of people changed their voting preference as a result of media consumption and that interpersonal discussions of political issues were more prevalent than consumption of political news within one typical day. Factors such as interpersonal communication with family members, friends, and members of one's social and professional circles turned out to be better predictors of a person's voting behavior than that person's media exposure. These findings came to be known as the “limited effects paradigm” of media influence, explicated more fully by Joseph Klapper in The Effects of Mass Communication (1960), which guided mass communication researchers over the next 5 decades.

The theory of the two-step flow of mass communication was further developed by Lazarsfeld together with Elihu Katz in the book Personal Influence (1955). This book explains that people's reactions to media messages are mediated by interpersonal communication with members of their social environment. A person's membership in different social groups (family, friends, professional and religious associations, etc.) has more influence on that person's decision-making processes and behavior than does information from mass media. Researchers of mass communication cannot therefore conceive the public as a homogenous mass audience that actively processes and responds to media messages uniformly, as postulated by initial theories of mass communication such as the hypodermic needle model, which assumed that audiences responded to media messages directly as if the message had been injected into them.

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