6 Media Versus Reality

There are many people The School of Communication at The Ohio State University that study incidental media effects. Incidental media effects were not created with an intention to persuade people. For example, media that promotes stereotypes were rarely created to try to cause people to feel negative stereotypes about other groups of people. Likewise, media producers may not plan to leave certain demographics of people out of their media.

However, misrepresentation is more than just an inconvenience. Representation really does make a big difference both for individual people, and how they feel about themselves, and society as a whole, particularly when we have overarching stereotypes or just lack of general information about certain groups and cultures. Misrepesentation or lack of representation also has a very serious policy implications for citizenship.

I’d like to share some specific examples that in hindsight, might sounds obvious. However, these are generally not something that we spend a lot of time thinking about. The first issue I wanted to talk to you about is the idea of dehumanization. This happens a lot in the media, sometimes it’s intentional, we’re going to talk about some of the worst stuff that was intentional, but it’s not always intentional. This peer-reviewed article provides information on dehumanization [cite]. The article is called “Less Than Human”, and they found that even TV programming that does not explicitly depict sexual violence and pornography are related to attitudes and behaviors supportive of violence against women, but media literacy programs might be able to help mitigate this effect. This happened particularly with sports programs on TV. Researchers asked why watching sports a lot, on average, causes people to objectify or have negative attitudes towards women. They found the reason is that the programming made the viewers think, on average, that women are not really autonomous, feeling creatures, but things, worse yet, things who are there for men’s entertainment. While the intention for sports programming is unlikely to have been to cause women to be objectified, this objectification does occur and can lead to behaviors that are supportive of violence against women. Thus, this is an incidental effect.

This doesn’t mean if you watch sports that you are automatically going to support violence against women; it doesn’t work that way. However, in the social sciences we are generally looking at different groups of people and looking at them on average. So there are lots of people who watch sports programming and do not experience these negative effects. Sadly there are also a lot of people who watch sports programming who do experience these kind of effects. Researchers often question why the same media have very different effects on different people. What is it about this group that makes them have this very negative response, and other people might not respond to it as much if at all? Many studies look at interactions between different personality characteristics that can explain these differences.

Moving on, let’s look at an example about how stereotypes in the media can cause people to be less supportive of social-political movements. There is an article [cite] that showed that exposure to sexually explicit internet material was related to more resistance to the Me Too movement and more acceptance of rape myths, through notions of women as sex objects. So that is another incidental effect that can have some very serious implications for society at large.

[next study] This study found that media representation of Black Americans tends to be very inaccurate and stereotypical. When TV shows tend not to be representative of the typical real life populations, we have this disconnect between reality and the media that can have some very serious implications for people. For example, it contributes to victim blaming. For example, if a Black American is the victim of a shooting, they’re more likely to be blamed for their own shooting than someone of a different race, particularly of a white person. Victim blaming, in turn, impacts policy support. For example, when there’s a natural disaster that has primarily affected Black Americans, people are less likely to support using federal funds to support people than they would be if the primary victims were white. Another example is that media effects influence real-life jury trials and  verdicts.

With this next article, [cite] we see that some of these media effects can cycle or spiral. This article examined stereotypes about Muslim Americans in the media. They found that Muslim American students who were exposed to media that negatively portrayed Muslims made them just want to spend more time with other non Muslim Americans, less than they did before. They were more likely to avoid interacting with others and they didn’t desire acceptance as much. So it causes a group of people who may have already been so separated from each other, to be even more separated, which is not good for a democratic citizenship. For a good democracy, we want people to be communicating with each other, sharing ideas, understanding what each other’s lives are like. But this kind of thing creates this cycle where it becomes even more difficult for that to happen. This shows how the dangers of a stereotype can escalate.

Pornography is another issue where we see a disconnect between reality and what what people are seeing on TV. Again, this can have a very negative impact on people’s behaviors. Studying males in a fraternity, after viewing pornography, men are significantly less likely to intervene as a bystander and report an increased behavioral intention to rape and are more likely to believe rape myths.  Bystander intervention is examined in a lot of these studies since it’s less common that men who watch pornography become rapists, but it is common that their willingness to help victims decreases after watching pornography. While they are more likely to watch pornography and have thoughts about committing these crimes themselves, that’s not the main issue here. Unfortunately, a lot of people who enjoy pornography become defensive and cite that they have never raped anyone. They use this as evidence that media effects don’t matter. However, that is a misconception because we see those effects on decreased support much more frequently than we do an actual intent to engage in this violent behavior. In sum,  people who watch pornography,are less likely to help someone that they see in need because they’re less likely to interpret it as a problem than they do if they are not someone who is a frequent pornography watcher. Then, when they’re less supportive of victims, they’re less supportive of political policies that helps support women who have been victims of sexual assault and domestic violence.

This is similar to research by Dr. Bushman showing that violent video games do increase aggression, and no, that’s not usually murder. This doesn’t mean you need to stop watching pornography or sports. And it doesn’t mean you need to stop playing video games to be a good citizen. What it means is you can make thoughtful decisions and take steps, such as seeking out pornography that does less objectifying of women, or finding video games that are less violent. Thoughtful decisions, as opposed to passive decsisions, makeks you a critical consumer of media.

Speaking specifically about children as a special group of folks who are negatively influenced by some of these anti realism
episodes that we see on mass media, let me start off by showing you an article by Dr. Bonus here at The Ohio State University. He did this really interesting study, looking at Children’s science programs. They had two different versions of teaching science through children’s programs. Sometimes it was kind of realistic, where they had like real insects, and sometimes they used anthropomorphic visuals, taking non human creatures and giving them human attributes. They were looking to see if kids learn more actual science from these kinds of realistic or the kind of non realistic portrayals of science. They found initially, if they watch the video, and you ask them what they learned scientifically, it looks like they’re about the same. But if you wait a week, and then test them again, the children who watched the the more realistic version, they were able to take this information they learned and apply it to the real world whereas the children who watched the anthropomorphic
videos, they weren’t able to make that connection to the real world.

Regarding children, violent media is also a frequently studied topic in the social sciences. Dr. Kelly Dillon and Dr. Brad Bushmans created different versions of the movies where people were playing with guns or not. Then, they had a play room here on campus, an actual playroom for kids to play in, and it had all kinds of different toys geared towards ages 8 to 12 that the kids could play with. Hidden in this play room, they had a real gun. The gun had been modified, so that it could not hold bullets, so it could not shoot. So it was safe. But it was, in fact, not a toy gun, it was a real gun. Just by looking at it, you wouldn’t know the difference; you wouldn’t know that it had been manipulated to not be able to hold bullets or shoot or anything like that. So, they would have kids watch a movie, and it was either the movie with or without guns in it. Then they let the kids play in this playroom, and while the kids were in the playroom, the researchers and the parents were actually watching what took place. A lot of the kids found the real gun in the playroom. The question was, what are they going to do once they find this real gun? Are they going to play with it? Are they going to tell an adult what’s going to happen here? On average, kids who had watched the version of the movie with guns in it were much more likely to play with the gun and even shoot it at each other. However, those who watched the version without the guns in it, were more likely to tell an adult about the gun.

Next, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about content analyses. Content analyses are where we’re basically not doing a full on experiment where we have group one and group two, this isn’t working here again. So let me go ahead and pull this up, the easier way is gonna go to library.osu.edu. And I’m going to put in my former name, which was Otto, and I worked on this with Mike Slater, and my dear friend, Pearl, Jane. And what we did is we were looking at a content analysis of food allergies in the media. So with the content analysis, what you do is you basically see like, what’s out there? So we wanted to know, like food allergies come up in entertainment media all the time. Might this have some incidental effects on people? Well, before we know what the effects are, we have to know what’s going on. So we would watch these TV shows and movies that had food allergies, or allergic reactions portrayed in them. And we would code them, we would see, well, how many times was the food allergy included for the purpose of humor, versus drama versus entertainment. And we had hypotheses about that we had hypotheses about the characters, you know, I kind of thought people who had food allergies on TV were more likely to be seen as kind of, you know, nerdy, and that was probably connected to the humor, we said it’s awkward or socially unattractive. And I wondered how much they advocated for themselves. Like if they had the food allergy that they would say, like, Hey, guys, do you know Don’t do this to me? keep keep this food away from me. So I have some information about how we located the videos, how we coded them the results that we found. And then we took those results. And we did an actual study, because we did find that a lot of the times that these food allergies were shown in the media. Incidentally, it was about humor. It was it was to be funny, like, Oh, this person’s got a peanut allergy. They’re gonna die. Haha. And we were looking at the effect that that can have on people. So here we experimentally manipulated it. To find out Well, okay, humor is out there. But what kind of effect does that have on people? Is it really negative and we found that it is, people who saw the humorous versions were less likely to consider the health condition to be serious, and that that can have some negative implications on people. We’re looking really at elementary schools, policy support, things of that nature, because that’s all related to
citizenship behaviors.

References

Edsall, T. B. (May 19, 2021). How storming the Capitol became a ‘normal tourist visit’. The New York Times.

King, A. (May 12, 2021). No bows and arrows and no broken English on the updated ‘Oregon Trail’. NPR.