mass-communication-theory

entered that conflict convinced it was as much a propaganda battle as it was a
shooting war. The Nazis had demonstrated the power of the Big Lie. America
needed to be able to mount an effective counteroffensive. Before the United States
could confront the Japanese and the Germans on the battlefield, however, it had
to change people’s opinions on the home front. During the 1930s, there were powerful
isolationist and pacifist sentiments in the country. These movements were so
strong that in the election of 1940, Roosevelt promised to keep the United States
out of the war, even though the Nazis were quickly conquering much of Western
Europe. Aid to Britain was handled secretly. Until the bombing of Pearl Harbor,
American and Japanese diplomats were engaged in peace negotiations.
Thus the war provided three important motivations for people interested in
what would come to be known as attitude-change research. First, the success of the
Nazi propaganda efforts in Europe challenged the democratic and very American
notion of the people’s wisdom. It seemed quite likely that powerful bad ideas could
overwhelm inadequately defended good ideas. Strategies were needed to counter
Nazi propaganda and defend American values. Early in the war, for example, Carl
J. Friedrich (1943), a consultant to the Office of War Information, outlined the military’s
ongoing research strategy: detect psychological barriers to persuasion and
assess how effectively a given set of messages could overcome those barriers.
A second war-provided research motivation was actually more imperative.
Large numbers of men and women from all parts of the country and from all
sorts of backgrounds had been rapidly recruited, trained, and tossed together in
the armed forces. The military needed to determine what these soldiers were thinking
and to find a way to intellectually and emotionally bind them—Yankee and
Southerner, Easterner and Westerner, city boy and country girl—to the cause.
The third motivation was simple convenience: Whereas the military saw soldiers
in training, psychologists saw research subjects—well-tracked research subjects.
The availability of many people about whom large amounts of background
information had already been collected proved significant because it helped define
the research direction of what we now call attitude-change theory. Major General
Frederick Osborn, director of the army’s Information and Education Division,
enthused, “Never before had modern methods of social science been employed on
so large a scale, by such competent technicians. [The data collection’s] value to the
social scientist may be as great as its value to the military for whom the original
research was done” (Stouffer et al., 1949, p. vii). Equally important to those social
scientists was that this groundbreaking research set the tenor for their work for the
next two decades. By the time the war ended, concern about propaganda and propaganda
effects had given way to concern about mass communication and mass media
effects. The study of attitude change was an important focus in this research.
CARL HOVLAND AND THE EXPERIMENTAL SECTION
Chapter 6 The Rise of Limited-Effects Theory 149
The army’s Information and Education Division had a research branch. Inside the
research branch was the Experimental Section, headed by psychologist Hovland.
Its primary mission “was to make experimental evaluations of the effectiveness
of various programs of the Information and Education Division” (Hovland,
Lumsdaine, and Sheffield, 1949, p. v). At first, the Experimental Section focused
Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.