Cultivation Hypothesis

The cultivation hypothesis (also: cultivation thesis , cultivation analysis or rarely also cultivation hypothesis ) goes back to the research of the communication scientist George Gerbner . In the 1970s, Gerbner examined the role of television in conveying the view of the world to its recipients . His thesis: Especially those who watch a lot, i.e. people who watch television for several hours a day, are cultivated by television and see the world as it is conveyed on television. So television he sees as socialization sinstanz which distorted in consumer perceptions of the reality created.

To support the thesis, Gerbner compared social reality, the reality conveyed in the media and the reality of the public. To this end, he carried out a content analysis of the TV program ( Cultural Indicator Analysis ) and a recipient survey ( Cultivation Analysis ).

The thesis

The cultivation thesis postulates that the worldview deviates from the actual reality, especially with frequent viewers, because they expose themselves more to the television world and thus internalize it more. Indeed, television shows reality in a distorted way. It shows more violence , especially more homicides, than has actually happened. On television, violence mostly comes from men and is portrayed as a means of resolving conflicts. These findings can be transferred to the perceived image of reality: frequent viewers consider reality to be much more violent than it actually is. They are also more afraid of violence. Under certain circumstances, this fear can lead to an increase in the willingness to use violence, since the viewers think they have to defend themselves in the violent world.

As an indicator of cultivation effects, such as the dangers and threats in everyday life that are overestimated in comparison to the actual circumstances when viewed realistically, the difference between those who see often and those who see little, the so-called 'cultivation differential', was used predominantly.

As a reason for the power of television in the enculturation process, Gerbner sees, on the one hand, the great importance that television has assumed in Western society, as it reaches the majority of the population around the clock through its everyday presence, regardless of social class or age . On the other hand, he blames the properties of the medium itself by granting most of the program offers a common, predominantly consonant system of values, norms, as well as interpretation and behavioral patterns that they convey to the recipient.

Development history

The research on the cultivation hypothesis began as early as 1967. After public concerns about the possible negative effects of the apparently much more brutal television programs had arisen, the 'National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence' and the ' Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior 'commissioned a series of social science studies on media violence, which also funded Gerbner and his research team at the Annenberg School of Communication in Pennsylvania.

The group first became famous for the 'Violence Index' they had developed. It allegedly made it possible to quantitatively measure the 'violence content' of television programs and, consequently, to compare its development over time and in contrast to other television programs. From 1976, the content-analytical investigations were methodically supplemented by surveys and the intention to be able to make statements about the effect of television on the attitudes of the recipients. In 1980 the 'Violence Profile' appeared for the last time. In the following years the approach was modified and further developed by the so-called 'mainstreaming concept', in which the cultivation effects were extended beyond the area of violence, for example to gender and age roles.

background

For his research on the cultivation hypothesis, Gerbner chose the two-stage process of the 'Cultural Indicators Approach'. In a first step, the 'Message System Analysis' (MSA), the world of television should be analyzed as completely as possible. After the analysis was limited to the aspect of overt, physical violence for many years, the ambitious goal was to ascertain the entire complexity, i.e. all essential characteristics, structures, relationships and interactions of the stimulus.

In the 'cultivation analysis' as the second step, the influence of this television world on those who participate in it should be examined, i.e. above all the frequent viewers. The cultivation effects were then ascertained primarily through questions relating to the television world determined in the MSA. If the respondent gave an answer in terms of the television world, the influence of television culture on his ideas was deduced from this. Methodologically, a research design based on the paradigm of (quasi-) experimental social research is used, whereby the comparison of the experimental group of frequent viewers (in Gerbner people who use TV for 4 hours and more per day) should ideally be compared with a control group with non-viewers. However, since this was only inadequately available in the United States, Gerbner limited himself to the investigation of infrequent viewers (people who watched TV for 2 hours and less).

In addition, cultivation did not mean a simple cause-and-effect relationship between media content and audience views, but rather referred to rather long-term, cumulative consequences that result from the repeated reception of stable patterns in television messages. Such a continuous, dynamic effect process does not deny the respective contexts of the recipients or intervening factors such as interpersonal communication or direct experience, but assumes that such factors play a role as intervening variables (cf. Gerbner et al. 2002: 197) .

Criticism and further development

While the theoretical assumptions of the cultivation analysis apparently hardly encountered any contradictions, the formulated hypotheses and their empirical verification were sometimes exposed to severe criticism. In addition to the general problem of providing appropriate evidence of causal global relationships within such a complex interdependence in reality, this was not least due to the methodical implementation and avoidable deficits in operationalization. Initially, it was fundamentally doubted that the frequent viewers mainly expose themselves to the television programs examined in the USA. It is also controversial whether the frequent viewers and, much more likely, the infrequent viewers should be viewed as homogeneous groups at all (cf. Hawkins / Pingree 1980). Apparently just as unchecked, Gerbner's equation of intensity of use and influencing the recipients, according to which the time of television use becomes the central independent variable for measuring cultivation effects, that is, high viewers are more strongly influenced by television than infrequent viewers.

In the Message System Analysis in particular, it was criticized that the underlying sample of television messages was not created according to random criteria, but rather from program excerpts that were more or less arbitrarily compiled. The plausible accusation was also raised that the construct of violence was not valid and was therefore inadequately operationalized. Last but not least, it was doubted that the content analysis beyond the recording of individual characteristics is appropriate for the description of such a complex construct as the 'television world'. In connection with the cultivation analysis, the main objection was that it was not television, but other influencing variables such as age or gender, as intervening variables that were responsible for the observed difference between those who see a lot and those who see little.

The greatest doubts, however, were met by the generalizations of the television programs examined about the general structure of television content. Gerbner's team assumed that they hardly differ from each other and that the same symbolism is inherent in different programs. This was justified almost exclusively by the assumption that program production would always be subject to the same economic principles. However, investigations of other approaches also led to results that support the assumptions of the cultivation analysis. For example, cognitive research assumes that individuals tend to use relatively little, easily available information when forming their judgment. At the same time, with heuristic , non-systematic information processing, complexity is reduced through simplification. In addition, schemes that were activated recently ('recency effect') and particularly frequently ('frequency effect') are remembered more easily. Applied to the cultivation analysis, frequent viewers sometimes use availability heuristics that are more familiar to them than the infrequent viewers via the typical images of reality made available by television. In this sense, frequent viewers are more likely to resort to television-related cognitions, so that they tend to overestimate these perceived aspects of reality in terms of their occurrence (cf. Higgins et al. 1985).

In 1986 Winfried Schulz transferred Gerbner's study on the cultivation hypothesis to Germany. In his analysis, like Gerbner, he found that there is a significant correlation between TV consumption and anxiety and depression.

Unlike Gerbner, Schulz built several control variables (intelligence, social environment, gender, age, etc.) into his study and carried out multivariate analyzes . These no longer showed any correlations between TV consumption and anxiety / depression.

It can be concluded from this that anxiety and depression are not (or at least: not only) caused by TV consumption, but have several causes. It even seems likely that television does not influence the viewer's image of reality, but the other way round: The image of reality shaped by third-party factors (social environment, etc.) is the trigger in the first place for the high level of television consumption by the frequent viewer (e.g. escapist media use).

There is a suspicion that Gerbner's research results are artifacts , i.e. pseudo-connections that come about solely through the evaluation, especially since the terms "much" and "little viewer" were not used stringently by Gerbner either (In In the various survey waves of the original study, the time requirements for "a lot" and "little viewer" were set differently).

Even if there are well-founded doubts about the validity of Gerbner's study, cultivation effects through television consumption have now been proven in more than 300 studies.

It is now considered certain that television contributes to socialization. Although it is only one of many socialization factors (and not the most effective), it is particularly effective because almost the entire population is exposed to it. This may also be the reason why the measurable differences between those who see a lot, average and infrequent viewers are rather small.

In order to finally assess the relevance of the cultivation hypothesis, a long-term or longitudinal study is necessary. It is still unclear whether frequent viewers are really a homogeneous group, as the theory assumes, and whether they actually expose themselves to the programs examined in the cultural indicator analysis.

In more recent studies Gerbner has examined other aspects of the cultivation of television. He assumes that television has an effect on attitudes. He developed the so-called mainstreaming concept, according to which television aligns differences in attitudes in the population (high viewers) and leads to a convergence of viewpoints, i.e. one group of high viewers 1 assimilates another group of high viewers 2. (The main concern here is adjustments to general values and political opinions.) In contrast, resonance means that the media are particularly effective when the recipients feel personally affected. This means that if the group 1 is concerned and a group 2 is not concerned, the opinions do not align, they diverge. The epistemological questionable consequence of these two concepts is that the theory cannot be refuted: Either the opinions are similar (explanation through mainstreaming ) or they diverge (explanation through resonance ). A falsification in the sense of Poppers is hardly possible.

literature

Bonfadelli, Heinz: The Influence of Television on the Construction of Social Reality: Findings from Switzerland on the Cultivation Hypothesis. In: radio and television. 1983 / 3-4, pp. 415-430.
Gerbner, George / Gross, Larry / Morgan, Michael / Signorielli, Nancy: Growing Up with Television. The Cultivation Perspective. In: Michael Morgan (Ed.): George Gerbner: Against the Mainstream. The Selected Works of George Gerbner. New York / Frankfurt aM: Lang 2002, pp. 193-213.
Gerbner, George, Gross, Larry (1976): Living with Television: The violence profile. In: Journal of Communication. 26 (2), pp. 173-199
Hawkins, Robert / Pingree Suzanne: Some Processes in the Cultivation Effect. In: Communication Research, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1980), pp. 193-226.
Higgins, Tory / Bargh, John / Lombardi, Wendy: The Nature of Priming Effects on Categorization. In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. Vol 11 (1985), pp. 59-69.
Michael Schenk : Media Effects Research . 3rd edition, Mohr, Tübingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-16-149240-2 .
Signorielli, Nancy / Morgan, Michael (eds.): Cultivation Analysis. New Directions in Media Effects Research. London: Sage Publ. 1990.