Ten things Wrong with 'Media Effects'

Ten things wrong with the ‘effects

     model’

     David Gauntlett

                       This article is published in Roger Dickinson, Ramaswani Harindranath &

                       Olga Linné, eds (1998), Approaches to Audiences – A Reader, published

                       by Arnold, London. It is a different version of an article which first

                       appeared as 'Introduction: Why no clear answers on media effects?', in

                       Tony Charlton & Kenneth David, eds (1997), Elusive Links: Television,

                       Video Games, Cinema and Children's Behaviour, Park Published

                       Papers, London.

                       The article is copyright © David Gauntlett, 1998. Not to be republished

                       without permission. May be used for educational purposes, provided that

                       the author and source are acknowledged.

                       About this article: This essay provides an overview and

                       restatement of what I was trying to say in Moving Experiences.

                       The book examines all of the studies in detail, and generally

                       concludes that the research has failed to show that the media has

                       any kind of direct or predictable effects on people. This essay

                       takes a slightly different approach, setting out ten reasons why

                       'effects research' as we have seen it so far seems to be

                       fundamentally flawed and is often surprisingly poor. This leads to

                       a slightly different (implicit) conclusion, that media influences are

                       something that we still know very little about, because the

                       research hasn't been very good or imaginative... and so,

                       therefore, it's still an open question. At the same time, it remains

                       true that no research is going to find direct or predictable effects.

                       Viewers wondering what other approaches to media influences

                       there might be, may want to look at Video Critical, which

                       demonstrates a new audience research method using video

                       production, and discusses other alternative approaches.

     It has become something of a cliché to observe that despite many decades of research

     and hundreds of studies, the connections between people's consumption of the mass

     media and their subsequent behaviour have remained persistently elusive. Indeed,

     researchers have enjoyed an unusual degree of patience from both their scholarly and

     more public audiences. But the time comes when we must take a step back from this

     murky lack of consensus and ask - why? Why are there no clear answers on media

     effects?

     There is, as I see it, a choice of two conclusions which can be drawn from any detailed

     analysis of the research. The first is that if, after over sixty years of a considerable

     amount of research effort, direct effects of media upon behaviour have not been clearly

     identified, then we should conclude that they are simply not there to be found. Since I

     have argued this case, broadly speaking, elsewhere (Gauntlett, 1995a), I will here explore

     the second possibility: that the media effects research has quite consistently taken the

     wrong approach to the mass media, its audiences, and society in general. This

     misdirection has taken a number of forms; for the purposes of this chapter, I will impose

     an unwarranted coherence upon the claims of all those who argue or purport to have

     found that the mass media will commonly have direct and reasonably predictable effects

     upon the behaviour of their fellow human beings, calling this body of thought, simply, the

     'effects model'. Rather than taking apart each study individually, I will consider the

     mountain of studies - and the associated claims about media effects made by

     commentators - as a whole, and outline ten fundamental flaws in their approach.

     1. The effects model tackles social problems 'backwards'

     To explain the problem of violence in society, researchers should begin with that social

     violence and seek to explain it with reference, quite obviously, to those who engage in it:

     their identity, background, character and so on. The 'media effects' approach, in this

     sense, comes at the problem backwards, by starting with the media and then trying to

     lasso connections from there on to social beings, rather than the other way around.

     This is an important distinction. Criminologists, in their professional attempts to explain

     crime and violence, consistently turn for explanations not to the mass media but to social

     factors such as poverty, unemployment, housing, and the behaviour of family and peers.

     In a study which did start at what I would recognise as the correct end - by interviewing

     78 violent teenage offenders and then tracing their behaviour back towards media usage,

     in comparison with a group of over 500 'ordinary' school pupils of the same age - Hagell

     & Newburn (1994) found only that the young offenders watched less television and video

     than their counterparts, had less access to the technology in the first place, had no

     particular interest in specifically violent programmes, and either enjoyed the same

     material as non-offending teenagers or were simply uninterested. This point was

     demonstrated very clearly when the offenders were asked, 'If you had the chance to be

     someone who appears on television, who would you choose to be?':

     'The offenders felt particularly uncomfortable with this question and appeared to have

     difficulty in understanding why one might want to be such a person... In several

     interviews, the offenders had already stated that they watched little television, could not

     remember their favourite programmes and, consequently, could not think of anyone to be.

     In these cases, their obvious failure to identify with any television characters seemed to

     be part of a general lack of engagement with television' (p. 30).

     Thus we can see that studies which take the perpetrators of actual violence as their first

     point of reference, rather than the media, come to rather different conclusions (and there

     is certainly a need for more such research). The point that effects studies take the media

     as their starting point, however, should not be taken to suggest that they involve sensitive

     examinations of the mass media. As will be noted below, the studies have typically taken

     a stereotyped, almost parodic view of media content.

     In more general terms, the 'backwards' approach involves the mistake of looking at

     individuals, rather than society, in relation to the mass media. The narrowly individualistic

     approach of some psychologists leads them to argue that, because of their belief that

     particular individuals at certain times in specific circumstances may be negatively

     affected by one bit of media, the removal of such media from society would be a positive

     step. This approach is rather like arguing that the solution to the number of road traffic

     accidents in Britain would be to lock away one famously poor driver from Cornwall; that

     is, a blinkered approach which tackles a real problem from the wrong end, involves

     cosmetic rather than relevant changes, and fails to look in any way at the 'bigger picture'.

     2. The effects model treats children as inadequate

     The individualism of the psychological discipline has also had a significant impact on the

     way in which children are regarded in effects research. Whilst sociology in recent

     decades has typically regarded childhood as a social construction, demarcated by

     attitudes, traditions and rituals which vary between different societies and different time

     periods (Ariés, 1962; Jenks, 1982, 1996), the psychology of childhood - developmental

     psychology - has remained more tied to the idea of a universal individual who must

     develop through particular stages before reaching adult maturity, as established by Piaget

     (e.g. 1926, 1929). The developmental stages are arranged as a hierarchy, from

     incompetent childhood through to rational, logical adulthood, and progression through

     these stages is characterised by an 'achievement ethic' (Jenks, 1996, p. 24).

     In psychology, then, children are often considered not so much in terms of what they can

     do, as what they (apparently) cannot. Negatively defined as non-adults, the research

     subjects are regarded as the 'other', a strange breed whose failure to match generally

     middle-class adult norms must be charted and discussed. Most laboratory studies of

     children and the media presume, for example, that their findings apply only to children, but

     fail to run parallel studies with adult groups to confirm this. We might speculate that this

     is because if adults were found to respond to laboratory pressures in the same way as

     children, the 'common sense' validity of the experiments would be undermined.

     In her valuable examination of the way in which academic studies have constructed and

     maintained a particular perspective on childhood, Christine Griffin (1993) has recorded

     the ways in which studies produced by psychologists, in particular, have tended to 'blame

     the victim', to represent social problems as the consequence of the deficiencies or

     inadequacies of young people, and to 'psychologize inequalities, obscuring structural

     relations of domination behind a focus on individual "deficient" working-class young

     people and/or young people of colour, their families or cultural backgrounds' (p. 199).

     Problems such as unemployment and the failure of education systems are thereby traced

     to individual psychology traits. The same kinds of approach are readily observed in media

     effects studies, the production of which has undoubtedly been dominated by

     psychologically-oriented researchers, who - whilst, one imagines, having nothing other

     than benevolent intentions - have carefully exposed the full range of ways in which young

     media users can be seen as the inept victims of products which, whilst obviously puerile

     and transparent to adults, can trick children into all kinds of ill-advised behaviour.

     This situation is clearly exposed by research which seeks to establish what children can

     and do understand about and from the mass media. Such projects have shown that

     children can talk intelligently and indeed cynically about the mass media (Buckingham,

     1993, 1996), and that children as young as seven can make thoughtful, critical and 'media

     literate' video productions themselves (Gauntlett, 1997).

     3. Assumptions within the effects model are characterised by

     barely-concealed conservative ideology

     The systematic derision of children's resistant capacities can be seen as part of a broader

     conservative project to position the more contemporary and challenging aspects of the

     mass media, rather than other social factors, as the major threat to social stability today.

     American effects studies, in particular, tend to assume a level of television violence

     which - as Barrie Gunter shows in this volume - is simply not applicable in other countries

     such as Britain. George Gerbner's view, for example, that 'We are awash in a tide of

     violent representations unlike any the world has ever seen... drenching every home with

     graphic scenes of expertly choreographed brutality' (1994, p. 133), both reflects his

     hyperbolic view of the media in America and the extent to which findings cannot be

     simplistically transferred across the Atlantic. Whilst it is certainly possible that gratuitous

     depictions of violence might reach a level in American screen media which could be seen

     as unpleasant and unnecessary, it cannot always be assumed that violence is shown for

     'bad' reasons or in an uncritical light. Even the most obviously 'gratuitous' acts of

     violence, such as those committed by Beavis and Butt-Head in their eponymous MTV

     series, can be interpreted as rationally resistant reactions to an oppressive world which

     has little to offer them (see Gauntlett, 1997).

     The condemnation of generalised screen 'violence' by conservative critics, supported by

     the 'findings' of the effects studies - if we disregard their precarious foundations - can

     often be traced to concerns such as 'disrespect for authority' and 'anti-patriotic

     sentiments' (most conspicuously in Michael Medved's well-received Hollywood vs.

     America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values (1992)). Programmes

     which do not necessarily contain any greater quantity of violent, sexual or other

     controversial depictions than others, can be seen to be objected to because they take a

     more challenging socio-political stance (Barker, 1984, 1989, 1993). This was illustrated by

     a study of over 2,200 complaints about British TV and radio which were sent to the

     Broadcasting Standards Council over an 18 month period from July 1993 to December

     1994 (Gauntlett, 1995c). This showed that a relatively narrow range of most

     complained-of programmes were taken by complainants to characterise a much broader

     decline in the morals of both broadcasting in particular and the nation in general.

     This view of a section of the public is clearly reflected in a large number of the effects

     studies which presume that 'antisocial' behaviour is an objective category which can be

     observed in numerous programmes and which will negatively affect those children who

     see it portrayed. This dark view is constructed with the support of content analysis

     studies which appear almost designed to incriminate the media. Even today, expensive

     and avowedly 'scientific' content analyses such as the well-publicised US National

     Television Violence Study (Mediascope, 1996; run by the Universities of California,

     North Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin), for example, include odd tests such as whether

     violent acts are punished within the same scene - a strange requirement for dramas -

     making it easier to support views such as that 'there are substantial risks of harmful

     effects from viewing violence throughout the television environment' (p. ix). [Footnote:

     Examination of programmes in full, sensibly also included in this study, found that

     ‘punishments occur by the end of the program (62%) more often than not for bad

     characters’, however (Mediascope, 1996, p. 15). Despite this finding, and the likelihood

     that a number of the remaining 38% would be punished in subsequent programmes, much

     is made of the finding that ‘violence goes unpunished (73%) in almost three out of four

     scenes’ (point repeated on p. x, p. 15, p. 25; my emphasis)]. This study also reflects the

     continuing willingness of researchers to impute effects from a count-up of content.

     4. The effects model inadequately defines its own objects of study

     The flaws numbered four to six in this list are more straightforwardly methodological,

     although they are connected to the previous and subsequent points. The first of these is

     that effects studies have generally taken for granted the definitions of media material,

     such as 'antisocial' and 'prosocial' programming, as well as characterisations of behaviour

     in the real world, such as 'antisocial' and 'prosocial' action. The point has already been

     made that these can be ideological value judgements; throwing down a book in disgust,

     smashing a nuclear missile, or - to use a Beavis and Butt-Head example - sabotaging

     activities at one's burger bar workplace, will always be interpreted in effects studies as

     'antisocial', not 'prosocial'.

     Furthermore, actions such as verbal aggression or hitting an inanimate object are

     recorded as acts of violence, just as TV murders are, leading to terrifically (and

     irretrievably) murky data. It is usually impossible to discern whether very minor or

     extremely serious acts of 'violence' depicted in the media are being said to have led to

     quite severe or merely trivial acts in the real world. More significant, perhaps, is the fact

     that this is rarely seen as a problem: in the media effects field, dodgy 'findings' are

     accepted with an uncommon hospitality.

     5. The effects model is often based on artificial studies

     Since careful sociological studies of media effects require amounts of time and money

     which limit their abundance, they are heavily outnumbered by simpler studies which are

     usually characterised by elements of artificiality. Such studies typically take place in a

     laboratory, or in a 'natural' setting such as a classroom but where a researcher has

     conspicuously shown up and instigated activities, neither of which are typical

     environments. Instead of a full and naturally-viewed television diet, research subjects are

     likely to be shown selected or specially-recorded clips which lack the narrative meaning

     inherent in everyday TV productions. They may then be observed in simulations of real

     life presented to them as a game, in relation to inanimate objects such as Bandura's

     famous 'bobo' doll, or as they respond to questionnaires, all of which are unlike

     interpersonal interaction, cannot be equated with it, and are likely to be associated with

     the previous viewing experience in the mind of the subject, rendering the study invalid.

     Such studies also rely on the idea that subjects will not alter their behaviour or stated

     attitudes as a response to being observed or questioned. This naive belief has been shown

     to be false by researchers such as Borden (1975) who have demonstrated that the

     presence, appearance and gender of an observer can radically affect children's

     behaviour.

     6. The effects model is often based on studies with misapplied

     methodology

     Many of the studies which do not rely on an experimental method, and so may evade the

     flaws mentioned in the previous section, fall down instead by applying a methodological

     procedure wrongly, or by drawing inappropriate conclusions from particular methods. The

     widely-cited longitudinal panel study by Huesmann, Eron and colleagues (Lefkowitz,

     Eron, Walder & Huesmann, 1972, 1977), for example, has been less famously slated for

     failing to keep to the procedures, such as assessing aggressivity or TV viewing with the

     same measures at different points in time, which are necessary for their statistical

     findings to have any validity (Chaffee, 1972; Kenny, 1972). [Footnote: A longitudinal

     panel study is one in which the same group of people (the panel) are surveyed and/or

     observed at a number of points over a period of time]. The same researchers have also

     failed to adequately account for why the findings of this study and those of another of

     their own studies (Huesmann, Lagerspetz & Eron, 1984) absolutely contradict each other,

     with the former concluding that the media has a marginal effect on boys but no effect on

     girls, and the latter arguing the exact opposite (no effect on boys, but a small effect for

     girls). They also seem to ignore that fact that their own follow-up of their original set of

     subjects 22 years later suggested that a number of biological, developmental and

     environmental factors contributed to levels of aggression, whilst the mass media was not

     even given a mention (Huesmann, Eron, Lefkowitz & Walder, 1984). These astounding

     inconsistencies, unapologetically presented by perhaps the best-known researchers in this

     area, must be cause for considerable unease about the effects model. More careful use

     of the same methods, such as in the three-year panel study involving over 3,000 young

     people conducted by Milavsky, Kessler, Stipp & Rubens (1982a, 1982b), has only

     indicated that significant media effects are not to be found.

     Another misuse of method occurs when studies which are simply unable to show that one

     thing causes another are treated as if they have done so. Correlation studies are typically

     used for this purpose. Their finding that a particular personality type is also the kind of

     person who enjoys a certain kind of media, is quite unable to show that the latter causes

     the former, although psychologists such as Van Evra (1990) have casually assumed that

     this is probably the case. There is a logical coherence to the idea that children whose

     behaviour is antisocial and disruptional will also have a greater interest in the more violent

     and noisy television programmes, whereas the idea that the behaviour is a product of

     these programmes lacks both this rational consistency, and the support of the studies.

     7. The effects model is selective in its criticisms of media depictions

     of violence

     In addition to the point that 'antisocial' acts are ideologically defined in effects studies (as

     noted in section three above), we can also note that the media depictions of 'violence'

     which the effects model typically condemns are limited to fictional productions. The acts

     of violence which appear on a daily basis on news and serious factual programmes are

     seen as somehow exempt. The point here is not that depictions of violence in the news

     should necessarily be condemned in just the same, blinkered way, but rather to draw

     attention to another philosophical inconsistency which the model cannot account for. If

     the antisocial acts shown in drama series and films are expected to have an effect on the

     behaviour of viewers, even though such acts are almost always ultimately punished or

     have other negative consequences for the perpetrator, there is no obvious reason why the

     antisocial activities which are always in the news, and which frequently do not have such

     apparent consequences for their agents, should not have similar effects.

     8. The effects model assumes superiority to the masses

     Surveys typically show that whilst a certain proportion of the public feel that the media

     may cause other people to engage in antisocial behaviour, almost no-one ever says that

     they have been affected in that way themselves. This view is taken to extremes by

     researchers and campaigners whose work brings them into regular contact with the

     supposedly corrupting material, but who are unconcerned for their own well-being as they

     implicitly 'know' that the effects will only be on 'other people'. Insofar as these others are

     defined as children or 'unstable' individuals, their approach may seem not unreasonable; it

     is fair enough that such questions should be explored. Nonetheless, the idea that it is

     unruly 'others' who will be affected - the uneducated? the working class? - remains at the

     heart of the effects paradigm, and is reflected in its texts (as well, presumably, as in the

     researchers' overenthusiastic interpretation of weak or flawed data, as discussed above).

     George Gerbner and his colleagues, for example, write about 'heavy' television viewers

     as if this media consumption has necessarily had the opposite effect on the weightiness of

     their brains. Such people are assumed to have no selectivity or critical skills, and their

     habits are explicitly contrasted with preferred activities: 'Most viewers watch by the

     clock and either do not know what they will watch when they turn on the set, or follow

     established routines rather than choose each program as they would choose a book, a

     movie or an article' (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan & Signorielli, 1986, p.19). This view, which

     knowingly makes inappropriate comparisons by ignoring the serial nature of many TV

     programmes, and which is unable to account for the widespread use of TV guides and

     VCRs with which audiences plan and arrange their viewing, reveals the kind of elitism

     and snobbishness which often seems to underpin such research. The point here is not that

     the content of the mass media must not be criticised, but rather that the mass audience

     themselves are not well served by studies which are willing to treat them as potential

     savages or actual fools.

     9. The effects model makes no attempt to understand meanings of

     the media

     A further fundamental flaw, hinted at in points three and four above, is that the effects

     model necessarily rests on a base of reductive assumptions and unjustified stereotypes

     regarding media content. To assert that, say, 'media violence' will bring negative

     consequences is not only to presume that depictions of violence in the media will always

     be promoting antisocial behaviour, and that such a category exists and makes sense, as

     noted above, but also assumes that the medium holds a singular message which will be

     carried unproblematically to the audience. The effects model therefore performs the

     double deception of presuming (a) that the media presents a singular and clear-cut

     'message', and (b) that the proponents of the effects model are in a position to identify

     what that message is.

     The meanings of media content are ignored in the simple sense that assumptions are

     made based on the appearance of elements removed from their context (for example,

     woman hitting man equals violence equals bad), and in the more sophisticated sense that

     even in context the meanings may be different for different viewers (woman hitting man

     equals an unpleasant act of aggression, or appropriate self-defence, or a triumphant act

     of revenge, or a refreshing change, or is simply uninteresting, or any of many further

     alternative readings). In-depth qualitative studies have unsurprisingly given support to the

     view that media audiences routinely arrive at their own, often heterogeneous,

     interpretations of everyday media texts (e.g. Buckingham, 1993, 1996; Hill, 1997;

     Schlesinger, Dobash, Dobash & Weaver, 1992; Gray, 1992; Palmer, 1986). Since the

     effects model rides roughshod over both the meanings that actions have for characters in

     dramas and the meanings which those depicted acts may have for the audience

     members, it can retain little credibility with those who consider popular entertainment to

     be more than just a set of very basic propaganda messages flashed at the audience in the

     simplest possible terms.

     10. The effects model is not grounded in theory

     Finally, and underlying many of the points made above, is the fundamental problem that

     the entire argument of the 'effects model' is substantiated with no theoretical reasoning

     beyond the bald assertions that particular kinds of effects will be produced by the media.

     The basic question of why the media should induce people to imitate its content has never

     been adequately tackled, beyond the simple idea that particular actions are 'glamorised'.

     (Obviously, antisocial actions are shown really positively so infrequently that this is an

     inadequate explanation). Similarly, the question of how merely seeing an activity in the

     media would be translated into an actual motive which would prompt an individual to

     behave in a particular way is just as unresolved. The lack of firm theory has led to the

     effects model being based in the variety of assumptions outlined above - that the media

     (rather than people) is the unproblematic starting-point for research; that children will be

     unable to 'cope' with the media; that the categories of 'violence' or 'antisocial behaviour'

     are clear and self-evident; that the model's predictions can be verified by scientific

     research; that screen fictions are of concern, whilst news pictures are not; that

     researchers have the unique capacity to observe and classify social behaviour and its

     meanings, but that those researchers need not attend to the various possible meanings

     which media content may have for the audience. Each of these very substantial problems

     has its roots in the failure of media effects commentators to found their model in any

     coherent theory.

     So what future for research on media influences?

     The effects model, we have seen, has remarkably little going for it as an explanation of

     human behaviour, or of the media in society. Whilst any challenging or apparently illogical

     theory or model reserves the right to demonstrate its validity through empirical data, the

     effects model has failed also in that respect. Its continued survival is indefensible and

     unfortunate. However, the failure of this particular model does not mean that the impact

     of the mass media can no longer be considered or investigated.

     The studies by Greg Philo and Glasgow University Media Group colleagues, for example,

     have used often imaginative methods to explore the influence of media presentations

     upon perceptions and interpretations of factual matters (e.g. Philo, 1990; Philo, ed., 1996).

     I have realised rather late that my own study (Gauntlett, 1997) in which children made

     videos about the environment, which were used as a way of understanding the discourses

     and perspectives on environmentalism which the children had acquired from the media,

     can be seen as falling broadly within this tradition. The strength of this work is that it

     operates on a terrain different from that occupied by the effects model; even at the most

     obvious level, it is about influences and perceptions, rather than effects and behaviour.

     However, whilst such studies may provide valuable reflections on the relationship

     between mass media and audiences, they cannot - for the same reason - directly

     challenge claims made from within the 'effects model' paradigm (as Miller & Philo (1996)

     have misguidedly supposed). This is not a weakness of these studies, of course; the

     effects paradigm should be left to bury itself whilst prudent media researchers move on

     to explore these other areas.

     Any paradigm which is able to avoid the flaws and assumptions which have inevitably

     and quite rightly ruined the effects model is likely to have some advantages. With the rise

     of qualitative studies which actually listen to media audiences, we are seeing the

     advancement of a more forward-thinking, sensible and compassionate view of those who

     enjoy the mass media. After decades of stunted and rather irresponsible talk about media

     'effects', the emphasis is hopefully changing towards a more sensitive but rational

     approach to media scholarship.

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