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194 Section 3 From Limited-Effects to Critical Cultural Theories: Ferment in the Field imitation The direct reproduction of observed behavior identification A special form of imitation that springs from wanting to be and trying to be like an observed model relative to some broader characteristics or qualities social learning Encompasses both imitation and identification to explain how people learn through observation of others in their environments people can imitate what they see in the media. Imitation is the direct mechanical reproduction of behavior. After watching Spike TV’s Ultimate Fighting Championship, twenty-three Connecticut teens engage in a backyard slugfest/tournament that results in their arrest. Or two teenagers set fire to a New York subway tollbooth, killing its attendant, after seeing the movie Money Train. Both are true stories. Both demonstrate imitation. The problem for mass communication theorists, however, is that these obvious examples of media influence, dramatic as they may be, are relatively rare. Moreover, such gross examples of media influence lend substance to the argument that negative effects occur only in those “predisposed” to aggression—in other words, those crazy to begin with. Identification, on the other hand, is “a particular form of imitation in which copying a model, generalized beyond specific acts, springs from wanting to be and trying to be like the model with respect to some broader quality” (White, 1972, p. 252). Although only one or a very few people might have imitated the behaviors seen in our Ultimate Fighting Championship and Money Train examples, how many others identified with their characters? How many others might choose different forms of violence against someone they might encounter? How many others identified with the characters’ mode of problem solving, although they might never express it exactly as did our mediated aggressors? Imitation from media is clearly more dramatic and observable than is identification. But identification with media models might be the more lasting and significant of the media’s effects. (For a detailed discussion of this distinction and its importance to media theory, see Baran and Meyer, 1974.) The first serious look at learning through observation was offered by psychologists Neal Miller and John Dollard (1941). They argued that imitative learning occurred when observers were motivated to learn, when the cues or elements of the behaviors to be learned were present, when observers performed the given behaviors, and when observers were positively reinforced for imitating those behaviors. In other words, people could imitate behaviors they saw; those behaviors would be reinforced and therefore learned. Instead of presenting a means of understanding how people learn from models (including media models), however, Miller and Dollard were simply describing an efficient form of traditional stimulus-response learning. They assumed that individuals behaved in certain ways and then shaped their behavior according to the reinforcement they actually received. The researchers saw imitation as replacing random trial-and-error behaviors. Imitation simply made it easier for an individual to choose a behavior to be reinforced. That actual reinforcement, they argued, ensured learning. But this insistence on the operation of reinforcement limited their theory’s application for understanding how people learn from the mass media. Its inability to account for people’s apparent skill at learning new responses through observation rather than actually receiving reinforcement limited its applicability to media theory. Two decades later, Miller and Dollard’s ideas about what they called social learning and imitation were sufficiently developed, however, to become valuable tools in understanding media effects. Whereas Miller and Dollard saw social learning as an efficient form of stimulus-response learning (the model provided information that helped the observer make the correct response to be reinforced), 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.
contemporary social cognitive theory (as social learning theory is now known) argues that observers can acquire symbolic representations of the behavior, and these “pictures in their heads” provide them with information on which to base their own subsequent behavior. Media characters (models) can influence behavior simply by being depicted on the screen. The audience member need not be reinforced or rewarded for exhibiting the modeled behavior. SOCIAL COGNITION FROM MASS MEDIA operant learning theory Asserts that learning occurs only through the making and subsequentreinforcement of behavior behavioral repertoire The learned responses available to an individual in a given situation negative reinforcer A particular stimulus whose removal, reduction, or prevention increases the probability of a given behavior over time modeling The acquisition of behaviors through observation Chapter 7 Moving Beyond Limited Effects: Focus on Functionalism and Children 195 Operant (or traditional) learning theory as developed by the early behaviorists (see Chapter 4) asserts that people learn new behaviors when they are presented with stimuli (something in their environment), make a response to those stimuli, and have those responses reinforced either positively (rewarded) or negatively (punished). In this way, new behaviors are learned, or added to people’s behavioral repertoire—the individual’s available behaviors in a given circumstance. Two things are clear, however. First, this is an inefficient form of learning. We all know, for example, how to deal with fire. If each of us had to learn our firerelated behavior individually, we would have overcrowded hospitals. According to operant learning theory, each of us, when presented with that stimulus (fire), would render a chance response (put our hand in it), and be burned. To ensure that we would not be scorched in the future, we would add avoidance of fire to our behavioral repertoire. Because that initial burned hand “increases the probability of a given behavior over time” (in our case, avoiding flames), the stimulus (the burned hand) is a negative reinforcer (Zimbardo and Weber, 1997, p. 215). This process is very inefficient. Instead we observe, in a variety of settings (mass-mediated and otherwise), the operation of that stimulus-response-reinforcement chain, and we in turn add avoidance to the store of behaviors that we can use when confronted in everyday life by the stimulus. In essence, then, we have substituted a representation—a picture in our head—of an experience for an actual (and, in this case, painful) experience. A second obvious point is that we do not learn in only this operant manner. We have all experienced learning through observation, even when we have not seen the stimulus-response-reinforcement chain—that is, when there has been no reinforcement, either to us or to the person in the representation. Observation of a behavior is sufficient for people to learn that behavior. Even people who have never shot an arrow from a bow, for example, know how it’s done. Modeling from the mass media, then, is an efficient way to learn a wide range of behaviors and solutions to problems that we would otherwise learn slowly or not at all, or pay too high a price to learn in the actual environment. This learning from observation of the environment, or social cognition, is the basis of social cognitive theory. According to Albert Bandura, “Social cognitive theory explains psychosocial functioning in terms of triadic reciprocal causation. In this model of reciprocal determinism, behavior; cognitive, biological, and other personal factors; and environmental events all operate as interacting determinants that influence each other bidirectionally” (1994, p. 61). In other words, things they experience in their environments (e.g., mass media) can affect people’s behaviors, and that effect is influenced by various personal factors specific to those people and their situations. 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.
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Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. Al
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1959 C. Wright Mills’s The Sociol
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From the Wadsworth Series in Mass C
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This is an electronic version of th
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To Sidney Kraus His words and actio
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x Contents CHAPTER 2 FOUR ERAS OF M
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xii Contents Limitations of the Exp
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xiv Contents Development of Recepti
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xviii Preface Many if not all of th
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xx Preface THE USE OF HISTORY In th
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xxii Preface about these issues. We
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xxiv Preface their refinement in he
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4 Section 1 Introduction to Mass Co
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10 Section 1 Introduction to Mass C
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CHAPTER 2 convergence The erasure o
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SECTION 2 42 THE ERA OF MASS SOCIET
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46 Section 2 The Era of Mass Societ
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CHAPTER 5 96 NORMATIVE THEORIES OF
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100 Section 2 The Era of Mass Socie
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SECTION 3 132 FROM LIMITED-EFFECTS
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134 Section 3 From Limited-Effects
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CHAPTER 10 278 MEDIA AND SOCIETY: T
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REFERENCES Adbusters. (2002). “Th
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366 References Century, April 17. (
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368 References Argument about New M
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370 References Gerbner, G., L. Gros
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372 References 1942-1943. New York:
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374 References Lasswell, H. D. (192
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376 References Miller, K. (2005). C
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378 References Preiss, R. W. (2007)
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380 References Smillie, D. (2009).
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382 References query Human capacity
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384 Index children, focus on functi
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386 Index I ice-age analogy, 342 Id
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388 Index media and culture theorie
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390 Index sensemaking, decoding and
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392 Index theory, understanding and
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