1
In F.T. Durso Et al (Eds.), (2007) Handbook of applied cognition (2nd ed.) . (pp. 659-682).
Chichester UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Cognition and Media
Richard Jackson Harris, Elizabeth T. Cady, and Christopher P. Barlett
Kansas State University
Here is a little quiz. Do each of the following as best you can.
1. Hum the theme music from the movie Jaws.
2. Sing Thriller by Michael Jackson.
3. Name the six characters on Friends.
Most people can accurately do each of the above, because it is virtually impossible to
escape the influence of mass media. It is not the scope of this chapter to attempt to define exactly
what the mass media are, because the concept of media is evolving and means different things to
different people. While mass media have traditionally been seen as encompassing print
(newspapers and magazines) and electronic/broadcast (radio and television), recent technology
has blurred the distinctions between media and entertainment and between mass and personal
media. Such activities as using the Internet, watching movies, or playing video games are often
considered a part of media. People spend more time each week watching television than in any
other activity except sleeping and working (Harris, 2004). In 2003, 13- and 14-year-olds spent
almost 14 hours a week watching television and almost 17 hours on the Internet (J. Weaver,
2003a). Seventy per cent of college students play video games at least “once in a while” (J.
Weaver, 2003b). Moreover, there are around 1500 daily and 8000 weekly newspapers and over
11,000 different magazines published in the U.S. (Wilson & Wilson, 1998).
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Mass media can benefit society by reporting daily news, playing the Top 40 music hits,
or televising public service announcements. However, there are also some negative aspects to
media. For example, violent television and video games have been blamed for everything from a
casual attitude toward mayhem to the 1999 Columbine High School shootings. Whether positive
or negative, the mass media clearly do affect people’s lives. Although social psychologists have
been studying these effects for decades, only more recently have cognitive psychologists
seriously begun to look at mass media, exploring their effects on certain cognitive processes.
This chapter discusses the general cognitive processes of attention, comprehension and memory,
and decision making, and discusses how the media influences each. Media are a major source of
knowledge, and how individuals process that information is vitally important to understanding
their effects on attitudes and behavior.
Attention
Attention has long been an important area of study in cognitive psychology. Sternberg
(2003) defines attention as a means of reducing the total amount of information that exists in the
environment to a smaller amount that affords further processing, making attention clearly
relevant to the mass media with its abundance of information. Specifically, cognitive
psychologists studying media effects are concerned with allocation of attention and multi-tasking
of media, both of which greatly affect media consumers and producers.
Allocation of Attention to Media
Since the media often contain large quantities of information, and people have limited
processing ability, much media content is necessarily only incompletely processed. Although this
issue applies to all media, research has predominantly focused on how people allocate attention
to television. Although the average person watches 3-4 hours of television a day, having the
3
television on does not necessarily mean that everyone in the room is fully attending to it. When
the television is on, adults and children will only attend to it between 58 and 75 % of the time
(Schmitt, Woolf, & Anderson, 2003).
However, children do not attend to all television equally. They attend more to television
when they fully comprehend the program (Anderson, Lorch, Field, & Sanders, 1981). For
example, children pay more attention to child-based content than adult-based content (LueckeAleksa, Anderson, Collins, & Schmitt, 1995) and attend to children’s television programs twice
as much when no toys are present in the room competing for their attention as when toys are
present (Lorch, Anderson, & Levin, 1979). Cognitive development is enhanced when actively
attending to educational television programming (Anderson, Bryant, Wilder, Santomero,
Williams, & Crawley, 2000), and children attend better to television programs when there are
short scenes, much movement, and purposeful character behavior (Schmitt, Anderson, & Collins,
1999).
Sometimes a media message may require considerable attentional resources, and other
times much fewer. This distinction is captured by the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM),
which posits two methods through which the consumer may be persuaded (Petty, Priester, &
Briñol, 2002). The central route involves active processing of the content by a thinking person,
while the peripheral route assumes a more direct effect of the superficial aspects of the media or
message (e.g., attractiveness of source) on a relatively passive viewer. Persuasion through the
peripheral route requires little attention allocation and occurs when the person has low
motivation or inadequate background knowledge needed to process the message. Motivation to
attend to a message for central processing would occur when the person believes that the
information has relevance or wants to learn more and elaborate on that information. When such
4
elements are missing, superficial aspects of the message, such as a sexy model or the presence of
a celebrity spokesperson, may lead to persuasion through the peripheral route (Petty et al., 2002).
The ELM also relates to comprehension and decision-making, which will be discussed later in
the chapter.
Media and Multi-tasking
Seldom do people sit and actively attend to only the medium in front of them. Rather,
they often multi-task, dividing their attention between the media source and an unrelated task.
Simultaneously attending to two messages or activities that require controlled (conscious)
processing is very difficult due to the limited capacity of attentional resources). Researchers have
examined performance on certain cognitive tasks, such as reading comprehension or recalling
information, in the presence of certain media such as music or television.
Ransdell and Gilroy (2001) found that when background music was playing,
undergraduates showed disrupted writing fluency (words generated per minute) while writing
essays, suggesting that background music consumes cognitive resources. Likewise, attending to
music can hinder other tasks. For instance, attending to song lyrics while driving is distracting
and negatively impacts driving performance (Anderson, Carnagey, & Eubanks, 2003).
Individuals tend to drive significantly faster when listening to fast tempo music compared to
slow tempo or no music (Brodsky, 2001). In a simulated driving vigilance task, listening to high
intensity music increased reaction time for stimuli in the periphery in a high demand condition
(Beh & Hirst, 1999). These studies suggest that music may have a negative effect on driving
under difficult conditions.
Like background music, background television can adversely affect performance on
certain cognitive tasks. Armstrong and Chung (2000) found that students reading newspaper
5
articles later scored lower on recall tasks if television had been on in the background. Pool,
Koolstra, and van der Voort (2003) found that Dutch children’s homework completion time and
total number of correct answers was hindered by a Dutch-language soap opera in the background
but not by an English-language music video or no television at all (which may be a function of
the differing languages of the media modality). Armstrong and Sopory (1997) found that
background television had a negative effect on performance on the Brooks Visual-Spatial
Working Memory Task. Although much of this research has shown that people have great
difficulty simultaneously performing two tasks requiring conscious attention, this is not always
so. Wickens (2002) offered an explanation for this apparent inconsistency by arguing that there
is less interference in multi-tasking if the two stimuli do not use the same sensory modalities or
coding channels (e.g., auditory vs. visual). This helps explain why many people are better able to
perform two very different tasks that require conscious attention, such as solving algebra
problems and listening to music.
Sometimes there may be performance decrements even when people believe they can
successfully multi-task two different tasks simultaneously. For example, many people drive
while using a cell phone, not only to talk but also to browse the Internet, watch a movie, answer
e-mail, instant message, or play games. Research using driving simulators has shown, however,
that drivers talking on either hand-held or hands-free cell phones make more driving errors and
have longer reaction times than those not using the phones. In some cases the distraction can
impair a driver as much or more than being legally drunk or slow the reaction time of a twentyyear-old to that of the average seventy-year-old (Strayer, Drews, Crouch, & Johnston, 2005;
Strayer, Drews, & Johnston, 2003; Matthews, Legg, & Charlton, 2003).
6
Thus, although a considerable degree of multi-tasking with media sources is possible, it
comes at a serious cost to performance on some other activity like driving or doing homework.
Comprehension and Memory
Comprehension of both linguistic and pictorial information in media involves many
cognitive structures and processes, such as working memory to store and transform information,
knowledge schemata to organize construction of memory representations, and cognitive
heuristics to guide retrieval. In addition, individuals must possess sufficient background
knowledge of the topic in order to fully comprehend the material (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995).
Since the process of comprehension thus has direct ramifications for the quality and quantity of
material later remembered, comprehension and memory will be considered together in this
section.
Long-term Working Memory
Traditionally, working memory was conceived of as the momentary storage of
information needed to complete an immediate cognitive task. This type of memory has limits on
both the amount and duration of the information and does not have the flexibility to allow
individuals to stop a cognitive activity, in contrast to reading, which requires memory to keep
track of plot and characters, and then resume the activity without decreased performance or the
need to review information already read (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995). To correct for this
limitation of the working memory model, Ericsson and Kintsch (1995) introduced the concept of
long-term working memory (LTWM), which allows for greater flexibility, although it requires
domain-specific knowledge in the area of discourse. In terms of media, long-term working
memory allows us to keep track of all the characters and plots in a complicated movie or novel
over a longer time frame than what is available in traditional working memory (Butcher &
7
Kintsch, 2003). For example, an individual can watch a mystery movie and remember critical
information and clues long enough to solve the mystery. Previously read information is stored in
long-term memory as the new information is processed, and any connections between the two
serve as the retrieval cues underlying LTWM (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995).
Skill involved in LTWM consists of using easily retrieved cues in short-term working
memory to rapidly recover information from long-term memory. Since long-term memory has a
theoretically unlimited capacity, experts on a topic can readily store huge amounts of information
about that topic. When media consumers watch a television show or read a magazine, their
LTWM performs two functions. The first involves the immediate activation of background
knowledge of the situation, which remains in LTWM in case it is needed for making an inference
to understand the new material. This prerequisite knowledge arises from a lifetime of social and
sensory experience, as well as knowledge of consistent patterns in certain media genres (Butcher
& Kintsch, 2003). The second use of LTWM in comprehension involves the maintenance of the
situation model constructed throughout the reading process. In other words, the reader or viewer
understands the input by making inferences and building a model of the events. As the reader or
viewer learns new information, LTWM keeps the model activated so it can be updated (Butcher
& Kintsch, 2003).
Schemata
Encoding information into long-term memory draws upon schemata, structures of
knowledge in the long-term memory of the perceiver. These cognitive structures become the
framework for accepting incoming episodic information, which then becomes integrated into a
memory representation that reflects both the prior schematic information and the new stimulus
input (Bartlett, 1932; Brewer & Nakamura, 1984).
8
While schemata provide a framework for encoding new information, integration between
the two sources of information has been argued to occur at the situation model or mental model
level of representation (Kintsch, 1998). A situation model involves the activation and integration
of both mental schemata and currently attended information in the environment, leading to the
observer’s real-time monitoring and understanding of the situation, environments, and other
individuals (Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). Such integration at the level of the situation model
ultimately leads to schema modification. If the new information is congruent with the activated
schema, the information will be integrated into the existing schema. If the information is
incongruent, accommodation occurs, which may result in the formation of a new schema.
Although we generally form and modify schemata through direct experience, certain
schemata may be formed through vicarious experience, especially through the media (Harris,
2004). For example, a teenager growing up in rural Nebraska might have a schema about life in
New York City, although she has never visited there. Instead, she might build her knowledge
base from information gained from both entertainment and news media. Thus, her schema relies
heavily on the view of reality projected by the producers of that media. Similarly, another
teenager living in Los Angeles might form a schema of rural life based on what he sees in the
media, which would necessarily reflect the views of the media producers, who may have limited
life experience with rural life. Media might also inform the contents of schemata about certain
groups of individuals, such as ethnic minorities or people from other countries. The influence of
the media on this knowledge base increases as the amount of life experience with those groups
decreases.
In addition, stored schemata may affect comprehension of media events (Harris, 2004).
For example, a person watching a basketball game on television follows the events of the game
9
by using schematic information about basketball to understand the actions of the players or
referees. The same happens in media entertainment genres, especially if the viewer can identify
in some way with the characters or situations in the show, which allows the viewer to retrieve
particular schemata to comprehend the plot. For example, a teenager watching a teen drama will
comprehend it differently than an adult viewer. In much the same way that schemata guide
understanding of real world events, comprehension of the media proceeds using previously
known information.
Activity schemata, called scripts, organize information about events and aid in
comprehending events or the media. Low and Durkin (2000) found that even young children
ages 5 to 11 use a script to comprehend television shows. The children were shown one of two
abridged versions of a crime drama. One version showed the story in the common form (i.e.
scenes in the order of crime, investigation, chase, arrest, and court), while the other rearranged
the same scenes. The youngest children recalled the story best when they saw the common form,
although older children were able to understand the other version, indicating that while young
children use well-defined scripts to understand television, older children display more flexibility
(Low & Durkin, 2000).
Framing
Framing by the media involves choices made by producers regarding what information to
provide the public and how to communicate it. One important use of a frame is to inform the
public what issues it should think of as important (Cohen, 1963), what communications
researchers call “agenda-setting” (McCombs & Reynolds, 2002). The frame of a news report
thus affects how viewers understand the issue under discussion. The media employ frames to
emphasize certain aspects of the world while downplaying others. By doing so, they help ensure
10
that the input is attended to and comprehended in certain ways (Entman, 1993). For example, if
the media are the only source from which people acquire information about a particular sport,
fans will only learn what fits into the frame employed by the media.
On a more local scale, even a minor change in the wording of an advertisement may
activate a frame, which then guides cognitive processing. For example, consider meat advertised
as “75 per cent lean” versus “only 25 per cent fat.” Consumers evaluate the former more
favorably than the semantically identical latter wording (Levin & Gaeth, 1988). Similarly, most
consumers prefer receiving a “discount” rather than a “surcharge,” even if the final cost is the
same. A positive frame leads to construction of a more positive image of the product.
Frames perform four specific functions. First, they identify the issues and problems that
merit media coverage. Second, frames articulate the reasons and agents that have led to these
problems. Third, they judge the causes in terms of certain moral tenets. In this way, the viewers
learn who is to blame and how those people should be judged. Finally, frames give specific
suggestions for dealing with these issues (Entman, 1993). In this way, the frame chosen by the
media producers can influence the thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs of the viewer.
Frames can occur in four stages within the mass communication process. First, the media
producers utilize their own frames or schemata (Entman, 1993) to determine what to
communicate to the public. This agenda-setting technique begins by increasing the relevance of
a topic until the media consumers focus their attention, thoughts, and actions on it (McCombs &
Reynolds, 2002). In this way, the media producers begin to shape the opinions of the public.
For example, sports media use a frame that values the athletic accomplishments of males more
than those of females, so sports reporters focus on men’s sports far more than on women’s
sports. This contributes to the public valuing men’s sports and athletes more than women’s.
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Second, the media message itself incorporates specific images, words, or sources of
information that stem from the specific frames (Entman, 1993). Taking the sports media
example, the language used to describe male athletes usually focuses on their strength or
abilities, while the language describing female athletes highlights their physical appearance
(Billings, Halone, & Denham, 2002; Eastman & Billings, 2000; Halbert & Latimer, 1994).
Third, the prevalent social culture provides certain frames that are common across many people
within a society. In other words, although the mass media choose to focus on men’s sports at the
expense of women’s, these media frames in part reflect a culture that tends to value athleticism
in males more than in females (Kane, 1988). Finally, viewers bring their own frames to the
media experience. For example, a woman who has participated in sports might be more likely to
focus on the athletic accomplishments portrayed in the media than on the appearance of the
athletes.
Framing can also affect coverage of political campaigns, which in turn can affect voters’
knowledge and behavior about the candidates. For example, Jamieson and Waldman (2003)
identified two predominant negative frames in press discussion of candidates George W. Bush
and Al Gore in the U.S. Presidential election in 2000. Bush was seen as dim-witted and highly
prone to speech errors (“Dumbo” frame), while Gore was seen as stretching the truth and trying
to pander to all constituencies (“Pinocchio” frame). With these frames guiding the media stories
about the candidates, Bush’s speech errors and ignorance of certain facts (“who is the leader of
Pakistan?”) were widely reported, while Gore’s stretching of the truth (“I invented the Internet”)
and inconsistent statements to different groups received more attention. Conversely, speech
errors and lack of knowledge were not noted in Gore, while factual misstatements and
“pandering” from Bush slid by largely unnoticed. Interestingly enough, after the 9-11-01
12
terrorist attacks, the Dumbo frame to describe Bush essentially disappeared in favor of a “strong
leader” frame. Many commented how Bush had changed as a leader as a result of responding to
the attacks, but it may have more been the reporters covering the President who changed
(Jamieson & Waldman, 2003).
Comprehension of News
News offers a useful domain in which to test people’s cognition in a real world setting,
which has both applied and theoretical importance (McCombs & Reynolds, 2002; Price & Czilli,
1996). News stories in all media are typically fairly short, self-contained pieces. Schneider and
Laurion (1993) found that people’s assessment of what they had remembered from radio news
was fairly accurate. With television, however, the simultaneous presence of the visual and
auditory information provides the potential of these modalities either complementing or
interfering with each other. In general, memory for pictorial material is better than memory for
verbal material (Graber, 1990), and memory overall is better if there is a close fit between the
video and the audio components, such as when the video illustrates exactly what the reporter is
describing. When the relationship is less clear or when the video and audio portions evoke
different previous information from the viewer’s memory, comprehension and memory for the
new information suffers (Grimes, 1991; Mundorf, Drew, Zillmann, & Weaver, 1990). Memory
for persons in the news can also be affected by the viewers’ social attitudes, such as whites being
more likely to identify an African-American than a Caucasian as a criminal suspect (Gibbons,
Taylor, & Phillips, 2005; Oliver & Fonash, 2002). Assuming the video and audio portions are
congruent, children remember news presented on television better than news presented only on
radio or in print, even if the latter contained illustrations (Walma van der Molen & van der
Voort, 2000).
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The Availability Heuristic and the Importance of Vivid Exemplars
Often in comprehension of media, compelling exemplars are critically important. A
cognitive heuristic called availability posits that we draw conclusions about the frequency or
typicality of an event or instance based on how readily we can retrieve relevant exemplars from
memory (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973, 1974). These easily retrieved examples are then seen as
highly typical, when in fact that may not be the case. If the first examples of Arabs that come to
mind are villains from film entertainment and terrorists from news, we may come to believe a
larger proportion of Arabs are terrorists than is in fact the case. The positive potential of this
principle is also considerable; for example, if Will Truman of the popular sitcom Will and Grace
becomes the prime example of a gay man, the social perception by heterosexuals of gay men
might be improved considerably. Entertainment presents numerous vivid and memorable
exemplars of diverse people and situations; when the distribution of these exemplars deviates
strongly from the real-world distribution, the risk of viewers having a skewed view of the world
markedly increases.
The power of vivid exemplars. Sometimes an unusually attractive or respected person or
character can greatly influence attitudes or behavior in positive ways. For example, after a sexy
“hunk” actor played a deaf character in a popular Brazilian soap opera, interest in learning sign
language soared. When NBC news anchor Katie Couric invited Today show viewers to watch
her colon exam live in 2000, requests for colonoscopies to screen for colon cancer rose 20 per
cent, almost surely saving numerous lives (Bjerklie, 2003). Bonds-Raacke, Cady, Harris,
Schlegel, & Firebaugh (in press) found that heterosexuals who thought about a positive gay
character on TV had more positive attitudes towards gay men than those heterosexuals who
thought about a either negative gay character or an unmarried character.
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One basic aspect of human cognition is that the rich sensory experience of our world
must be organized into meaningful knowledge categories for interpretation and storage in
memory. Specific and highly available exemplars or instances of particular categories or classes
of events often come to represent the entire category, whether or not they are in fact truly
representative. Which exemplars will prevail to mentally define the category depends on the two
major factors of frequency and vividness. The more often an instance occurs, the more
representative it will seem (Harris, Cady, & Tran, 2006). For example, if a large number of
African-American men in movies are criminals or drug dealers, many viewers (especially those
with limited life experience with African-American men) will come to see that image as typical
of black men.
A particularly vivid example is highly memorable and thus is very readily called to mind
when thinking of that category. For example, after the 1975 blockbuster movie Jaws portrayed
numerous shark attacks on swimmers at ocean beaches, coastal resorts reported a significant loss
in business. The highly vivid fictional attacks from Jaws, though extremely rare in real life,
were readily remembered and taken to be far more typical beach experiences than was in fact the
case. Vivid cases that elicit high levels of arousal (such as a shark attack) are especially
memorable, as are vivid cases that are frequently repeated (Harris, et al., 2006).
Gibson and Zillmann (1994) found that readers of a magazine news story about carjacking
evaluated the crime as both more serious and more frequent if the story had contained an extreme
example (victim killed in the crime) than if it had been less extreme (victim injured little or not at
all).
Comprehension of risk. Media reporting of vivid exemplars of crimes play a large role in
people’s assessment of their own personal risk. Even though violent crime rates in most places
15
fell precipitously between 1990 and 2005, most of the public believed they had risen, perhaps
because there has been a 400 per cent increase in U.S. network news coverage of murders during
this period. Most news stories are heavy on coverage of specific events and exemplars and much
lighter on deeper inquiry and analysis of causes or historical background.
Language and framing of the exemplars also affect the audience’s assessment of their
own personal risk from threats such as disease or violence. News reports routinely cover rare but
dramatic deaths like homicides or national disasters more heavily than they do more frequent but
less dramatic deaths such as those from heart disease or strokes. In addition, sensational risk
factors for crimes and diseases, such as the use of illicit drugs, are covered more extensively than
more prevalent risk factors such as obesity (Glassner, 1999). One model of why people fear very
unlikely events stems from exemplification theory, which provides a framework for memory of
events (Zillmann, 2002). As people watch a news report, they attend to and subsequently recall
the information in it according to three principles. First, if the event covered in the report is
concrete rather than abstract, it is more likely to be recalled. For example, given two stories on
flesh-eating bacteria, one interviewing a victim who developed the disease after contracting strep
and a second story giving the actual rates of infection (which are very low) but without any
specific examples of people who caught strep without developing the bacteria complication,
viewers later recall the more vivid and concrete interview and overestimate the occurrence of
flesh-eating bacteria (Glassner, 1999).
Second, events judged to be important are attended to and recalled better than events
judged to be irrelevant, especially if the events contain emotion-laden information. Because
highly emotional events would have been more relevant to survival in the evolutionary past,
humans have a well-developed limbic system that enables superior encoding of memories during
16
times of strong emotion (Zillmann, 2002). Highly emotional news photos, such as a shot of a
bloody disfigured body of an accident or war victim, evoke activation in the amygdala, and these
pictures are better recalled (Levine & Pizarro, 2004). However, the encoding of the immediately
preceding text may be disrupted by the picture (Christianson & Loftus, 1987; Loftus & Burns,
1982; Newhagen & Reeves, 1992). Furthermore, verbal material presented during or after the
intense image is remembered shortly afterward as well as or, in the case of material presented
immediately after the image, sometimes even better than material without an accompanying
intense image. Apparently, the intense emotional image disrupts the rehearsal in working
memory for the immediately preceding information, much as a head injury can produce
retroactive amnesia for events just preceding the impact. However, the intense picture is itself
highly memorable and may enhance memory for subsequent related information by serving as a
mental model or organizational schema for the construction of a memory representation.
Third, the occurrence of widely publicized similar events inflates one’s estimation of the
frequency of that category of events. After several school shootings that took place in the U.S. in
the late 1990s, many people began to fear being shot at school and to believe that school violence
was epidemic, despite the fact that the probability of violence in schools was declining and
remained very low. The same occurred after the terrorist attacks of 9-11-01. Overall, heavy
coverage of violent crime in the media leads to overestimates of the frequency of crime, although
actual crime rates in the United States declined from 1993 to 2005 (Bureau of Justice, 2005).
Such mis-cognitions may have serious consequences. A gruesome story about the
abduction and murder of a child evokes strong emotions in viewers, causing them to attend to the
story and recall it readily as a highly available and typical exemplar of the class of events “child
disappearances.” As a result, people overestimate the probability of such events and
17
misunderstand their typical character. The intense emotion induced by the story will then cause
the viewer to fear child abduction by a stranger, even though the large majority of child
disappearances are runaways and the perpetrator in 76 % of the actual child abductions is a noncustodial parent or someone else known to the child (OJJDP, 2000).
In addition to news, entertainment media also contribute to viewers’ overestimation of
risk. Criminal behavior prevails in entertainment media, especially police dramas and actionadventure shows. Although less than 1% of the crimes committed in the U.S. are murders, half
of media crimes are murders (Bushman & Anderson, 2001; Oliver, 1994). In addition, mentally
ill characters in the media are portrayed as violent 72% of the time (Signorielli, 1989), although
the proportion of mentally ill individuals who are violent in reality is only 11% (Teplin, 1985).
Portrayals of ethnic groups. Vivid exemplars may also be taken as typical representatives
of various social groups. Although the number of African-Americans on U.S. television has
greatly increased since the 1960s and now approximates the proportion in the general population,
they still tend to disproportionately appear in situation comedies or police dramas (Greenberg,
Mastro, & Brand, 2002). In contrast, Latinos, although even greater in numbers than AfricanAmericans in the general population, only comprise 2% of prime-time TV characters
(Poniewozik, 2001), mostly in comedic, criminal, or police roles. Native Americans in media
are almost entirely Plains Indians from TV and movie Westerns; thus, most Americans’
prototypical “Indian” became a Plains Indian, not a Navajo, Kwakiutl, Cherokee, or Iroquois.
With the decline of the genre of Westerns, Native Americans have all but disappeared from the
media, although the vivid Plains buffalo-hunting image persists.
The small number of characters overall, combined with the stereotypical portrayal of
minorities in the media, can thus lead to prejudiced views of these groups, especially in those
18
majority-group viewers with limited life experience with members of the group in question
(Greenberg, et al., 2002). Givens and Monahan (2005) used an indirect measure of prejudice
consisting of determining if various adjectives accurately described a target individual, who was
either an African American woman or a White woman. They found that participants who had
previously seen a video clip showing a highly sexualized African American woman (the
“jezebel” image) were faster to respond to adjectives related to jezebels than were participants in
the control condition. This indicates that media portrayals can make prejudiced attitudes more
accessible. Children, especially those who have limited real-life experience with people unlike
themselves, use television and movies as practice on which to build thoughts, emotions, and
opinions, or to learn behaviors to employ when faced with others of a different race. Thus, the
potential of television in creating, strengthening, or reducing prejudice is great (Graves, 1999).
Content analyses do not tell the whole story of how these portrayals affect the audience’s
perception. A strong character in an immensely popular TV show might “drench” the viewer
with an image of the minority that remains strong despite other portrayals the viewer might see.
In this way, certain actors and characters, such as Bill Cosby’s Dr. Cliff Huxtable from The
Cosby Show, will exert far more influence on the perceptions of the group being portrayed than
the many other less-seen exemplars of the same group (Greenberg, 1988). However, viewing
examples of individuals who do not fit into a stereotype will not necessarily easily change
stereotypes held by the viewer. Richards and Hewstone (2001) define subtyping as the process
of grouping those who deviate from a stereotype into a new category separate from the
stereotyped group. Rather than relaxing the standards for inclusion into the stereotyped group
and thus changing the stereotype, subtyping allows for stereotype maintenance. This occurs
more with less typical group members than with more typical ones. On the other hand,
19
subgrouping refers to the process of sorting individuals into several groups based on specific
similarities, although those individuals are still viewed as being part of the larger, stereotyped
group. This allows for variation within the stereotyped group and can serve to lessen the
stereotype (Richards & Hewstone, 2001).
Exemplars and the peripheral route to persuasion. Recall from the discussion of the
Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) that the central route to persuasion makes less use of
heuristics such as availability in cognitive processing, while the peripheral route relies strongly
on them (Petty, et al., 2002). Many of the negative effects of using heuristics to process
information in the media can be overcome by actively processing that information. For example,
motivating viewers to process information deeply can lessen cultivation effects, which occur
when viewers perceive the external world as similar to the world portrayed in the media
(Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, Signorielli, & Shanahan, 2002; Shrum, 2002). Although media
consumers tend to ignore base-rate information in favor of higher-impact exemplars, if someone
believes that information given in base-rate terms will be helpful, he or she will attend to it
(Zillmann, 2002). Anything that makes base-rate information more salient thus contributes to
overall media literacy.
Autobiographical Memory
Autobiographical memory consists of knowledge about events or experiences that have
occurred in one’s own life, including experiences that involve the media (Conway, 2001;
Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Autobiographical memory contains both sensory-perceptual
and abstract semantic knowledge. The first leads to a relatively exact memory trace, leading to a
mental replay for portions of the event, while the latter concerns a person’s unique history, which
affects one’s interpretation of the event. Due to the presence of these types of knowledge,
20
memories can be accurate in terms of both objective reality and one’s self-concept (Anderson &
Conway, 1997). Rich memories for event-specific knowledge often are encoded with imagery,
which helps elicit vivid memories. Although we do not tend to remember as many supporting
details from events that did not occur as from those that did, we can also recall vivid but false
memories of events that never happened (Garry, Manning, Loftus, & Sherman, 1996; Garry &
Polaschek, 2000; Sharman, Manning, & Garry, 2005). These attributions of reality can be
influenced by the motivation, biases, and experiences, as well as metacognitive skills, of the
person recalling the event (Mitchell & Johnson, 2000), thus reflecting the malleability of
memory.
Autobiographical memory can be studied by presenting some type of cue and asking for a
memory related to that cue. In media research, these cues often relate to autobiographical
memories of events, characters, or programs watched at some point in one’s life. This method
allows research into the effects on children of antisocial messages in media, such as sex or
violence (Cantor, Mares, & Hyde, 2003; Harrison & Cantor, 1999; Hoekstra, Harris, & Helmick,
1999). By asking adults about their memories of seeing an R-rated movie as a child, for
example, one can indirectly study effects without exposing young participants for research
purposes. Although there is an inherent problem of the inability to verify the memories of the
experience of watching a media event, the major interest is the remembered experience, with
objective accuracy of the memories of less concern than the participant’s memory of them
(Harris, Bonds-Raacke, & Cady, 2005). In such a study, the participant might be instructed to
think of the overall experience of watching a frightening or sexually themed movie in their
childhood. Once the experience has been recalled, the participant rates various aspects of the
event on several dimensions. For example, the experience of watching a frightening movie
21
might be rated for negative effects (e.g. insomnia) or positive effects (e.g. enjoyment)
experienced. Using the autobiographical memory technique in this way allows probing, albeit
indirectly and retrospectively, of the effects of seeing characters or events under more
ecologically valid viewing circumstances, rather than in a short segment viewed in more artificial
situations.
Music also plays a large role in autobiographical memory, and participants make more
accurate time estimates of when a song had been popular when they use associated
autobiographical memories as cues (Bartlett & Snelus, 1980). Both college students and adults
ages 66-71 best remember and most prefer music that was popular during their adolescence,
although the older adults did not remember those songs as well as the younger group overall,
unless the song evoked a strong emotional memory (Schulkind, Hennis, & Rubin, 1999).
Decision Making
Decision making involves selecting from among choices or possible outcomes. The
media influence decision making in terms of what products to buy, which candidate to vote for,
or whether a defendant is guilty or innocent. This section discusses how media affect judgments
and decisions in response to advertising and news.
Influencing Purchase Decisions
The goal of most advertising is to persuade consumers to buy products or use services.
Social psychology has long been interested in factors that determine how people are persuaded
by messages. In order for an advertisement to significantly impact the viewer, three elements
need to be involved: the communicator, the message, and the recipient (Hovland, Janis, &
Kelley, 1953). Source (communicator characteristics) and content (message characteristics) are
two factors that influence how people make decisions as a function of exposure to media.
22
Source. The source factor includes credibility and likeability, both components of who is
delivering the message. Credibility involves the perceived expertise of the source. If the source
of the information is credible (i.e., a prestigious journal versus a popular magazine), participants
will rate the prestigious source as more trustworthy (Hovland & Weiss, 1951). Furthermore,
participants rate people who appear knowledgeable, smart, or have impressive credentials to be
experts (Hass, 1981). An example of this includes an advertisement of a person in a lab coat with
a stethoscope selling aspirin. This person may not be a doctor (and in some cases may actually
admit this in the ad) but still has the appearance of a medical expert. Unless the message is of
great importance, viewers will probably accept the message without much scrutiny and fail to
use central processing techniques of the sort outlined in the ELM model (Petty et al., 2002) to
question the apparent expertise of the spokesperson (Maddux & Rogers, 1980).
Another source variable is likeability, which relates to how attractive, charming, athletic,
or popular the source is (Hovland, et al., 1953). Michael Jordan made commercials for Hanes
underwear and Ballpark Franks years after his retirement, and supermodels are paid to sell
underwear, jeans, and beer. Such advertisements can be very effective because of the attractive
or knowledgeable source, even if that source has no more expertise than the viewer about the
product (Harris, 2004). One explanation for the perception of knowledge in the spokesperson
may be affect infusion, in which an individual relies in part on affective information to reach a
conclusion that requires judging incoming information (Forgas, 1995). This model suggests that
if Michael Jordan has a positive affective tag associated with him, and the judgment needs to be
made efficiently (which is often the case with short commercial advertisements), then the affectas-information heuristic (Schwartz, 1990) is implemented. This leads to the source being
perceived as credible, even if the actors have no prior experience with the product.
23
Content. The content factor involves the information in the ad and how this information
is presented as important to consumers and advertisers (Hovland, et al., 1953). For example,
some Butterfingers candy bar ads state what the candy is made of and how good it tastes, while
others show characters from The Simpsons eating the candy.
Several different types of advertising appeals have been shown to influence memory
(Harris, 2004). One popular appeal is humor, which has spawned considerable psychological
research. Furnham and Mori (2003) found that people scored higher on a cued recall test of ad
content if the ad was humorous, while Krishnan and Chakravarti (2003) found that memory for
brand names was higher if the ad was humorous. Finally, people have a better memory for ad
content if it contained a cartoon than if it did not (Gunter, Baluch, Duffy, & Furnham, 2002).
Another class of appeals is emotional ads, which appeal to one’s feelings, such as a
commercial with a grandfather hugging his grandchild. Studies have shown that products in
emotional ads were better recalled than those in neutral ads (Friestad & Thorson, 1993; Hornik,
1989). One particularly potent kind of emotional appeal is the fear advertisement, which implies
some sort of threat if the consumer does not heed the message. An example is the anti-drug spot
with an egg in a frying in a pan and a voiceover message, “This is your brain…. This is your
brain on drugs…. Any questions?” This commercial sends the message that taking drugs will
“fry” your brain. Fear appeals can be very effective. Smokers were more likely to quit after
viewing ads that involved a fear appeal (Smith & Stutts, 2003), especially if the viewer was an
adult smoker (Beaudoin, 2002). The one caveat about fear appeals is that they may be
counterproductive if the fear threat is so strong as to invoke defenses in the viewer (Witte, 1994).
Individual difference variables. The final factor that significantly contributes to the
advertisement’s effectiveness is individual differences in the recipient. One such attitudinal
24
variable is self-monitoring, where high self-monitors are individuals who attempt to adapt their
personality to the environment and low self-monitors do not adapt to differing situations (Snyder,
1974). High self-monitors are more likely to pay for a product that has numerous images
advertised, whereas low self-monitors are more likely to pay for a product that has more qualityoriented (functional value of the product) ads (Snyder & DeBono, 1985). These researchers
suggest that high self-monitors will be more likely to respond to advertisements that are image
oriented because that may be another manifestation of the desire to strive to blend in across
differing situations, while low self-monitors may be interested in content-based advertisements
because that quality will be consistent across most environments (Snyder & DeBono, 1985).
Another individual difference variable that affects decision making is need for cognition,
which is the desire to understand and make sense of the surrounding world (Cohen, Stotland,
Wolfe, 1955). Research has shown that when an advertising argument is strong both high and
low need for cognition individuals will rate their attitudes toward and evaluate the message more
positively. If a message is weak, however, low need for cognition individuals will rate and
evaluate the message more positively than high need for cognition individuals (Cacioppo, Petty,
Kao, & Rodriguez, 1986). In other words, if the message contains a strong argument, people will
generally rate it as more positive. However, the salience of the message strength is more
important to individuals high in need for cognition, and they will rate an advertisement as more
positive if it is strong and as more negative if it is weak compared to low need for cognition
individuals (Cacioppo et. al., 1986).
The Effect of News on Decision Making
Decision-making is also important in areas of media other than advertising. One of the
most important areas involves news coverage.
25
One issue concerns the effect of media publicity on juror decision-making. Jurors’
exposure to specific pretrial publicity about a case does affect verdicts (Carroll, Kerr, Alfini,
Weaver, MacCount, & Feldman, 1986; Shaw & Skolnick, 2004). Lurid pretrial information
about a rape or murder case increases the likelihood of a conviction and cannot be erased by a
judge’s direction to disregard the information. Another concern involves general pretrial
publicity and jurors’ exposure to information about other cases involving similar issues. Greene
and Wade (1987) had students either not read any story or read a news magazine story about
either (a) the brutal rape of an elderly woman, or (b) the wrongful conviction of a man for a rape
to which someone else later confessed. Later, in what was presented as an unrelated experiment,
all participants acted as jurors for a different court case. Compared to the control group, twice as
many (20% vs. 10%) who had read of the brutal rape said that the defendant in the second case
was “definitely guilty.” Although 57 % of those reading about the prior miscarriage of justice
called the new defendant “probably not guilty,” only 25 % did so after reading about the brutal
rape, probably due to having that very available instance in their memory (cf. Tversky &
Kahneman, 1973; Zillmann, 2002). In the real world, jurors’ prior exposure to such examples is
all but impossible to control, because such cases receive heavy media coverage. As we have
already seen, a powerful, vivid example can do much to drive future information processing and
behavior (Zillmann, 2002).
In general, individuals maintain activation of information given in the media or in trials,
even if that information has been specifically recanted. Johnson and Seifert (1998) had readers
determine to which of two possible characters an anaphoric reference applied, and found that the
readers tended to recall incorrect characters even when the information had been corrected in the
same passage. This indicates that misinformation as well as true information affects readers’ text
26
comprehension. This holds true in mock juries as well, although introducing suspicion about the
motives of those presenting false information reduces the effect of the misinformation. Fein,
McCloskey, & Tomlinson (1997) performed two different experiments in which participants read
a transcript of a trial and then indicated guilt of the defendant. When the participants read news
stories casting the defendant in a negative light prior to reading the transcript, they were more
likely to give a guilty verdict despite reading the judge’s instructions to consider only the
information presented in the trial. However, participants who read the stories along with an
interview with the defendant’s lawyer who presented reasons to suspect the news media’s
motives were less likely to vote guilty than those who only read the media stories. Similarly,
participants who read statements in the transcript that were followed by an objection and
instructions to the jury to disregard that information were more likely to vote guilty than both
those who did not read the critical statements or those who also read a statement raising
suspicion about why the prosecutor introduced the evidence.
Media news coverage frequently provides information that corrects or updates previously
presented reports. In the case of the 2003 Iraq war, much information was presented as
unconfirmed and then updated, and more was imparted as true and later retracted or corrected
(Lewandowsky, Stritzke, Oberauer, & Morales, 2005). They presented respondents in three
countries with news statements related to the Iraq war and asked them about their memory of
those events. If they recalled the event, they were later asked to state whether initial information
had been retracted, indicating that the original statement was false. The American respondents
believed that both true and false retracted events were true, while Germans and Australians
believed the true events but not those that had been discounted. Lewandowsky, et al. (2005) also
found that the Americans believed in different justifications of the war than those in the other
27
countries, specifically that they were more likely to agree with U.S. policy. Those participants
who harbored suspicions about the reasons for war were more likely to discount the
misinformation than those who were not suspicious, regardless of nationality. Similar to Fein, et
al. (1997), this indicates that original reports are remembered even when they are later retracted,
although those who suspect the reasons behind introducing false information are more likely to
update their information and make decisions based on the corrected information than those
having no suspicions (Lewandowsky, et al., 2005).
Political Media. Considerable research has looked at the various ways the media can
influence political campaigns and elections. Houston, Doan, and Roskos-Ewoldsen (1999) asked
participants to examine the campaigns of two different candidates. One campaign had a positive
focus, while the other had a negative focus, and the participants were asked which candidate they
liked. Results showed that the positive campaign elicited a more positive evaluation than the
negative campaign. Benoit (1999) looked at U.S. Presidential nomination addresses between
1960 and 1996, and found that nominees used more acclaiming strategies (emphasizing their
own positions) than attacking strategies (attacking the opponent’s positions). Overall,
Democratic nominees used more acclaiming strategies and Republicans employed more
attacking strategies. If a candidate used a negative focus campaign strategy that was seen as
justified, people rated that candidate more favorably (Budesheim, Houston, & DePaola, 1996).
Political ads are another way of imparting political messages and ideas to voters. Some
purposes of political advertising are name recognition, agenda setting, image building, issue
exposition, and fundraising (Harris, 2004). Like the campaigns, political advertisements also
differ in emotional valence, with positive ads emphasizing the candidate’s strengths and negative
ads attacking the opponent. In terms of memory, negative ads are recalled better than positive
28
ads, even though voters do not like them as well (Faber, 1992; Garramone, Atkin, Pinkleton, &
Cole, 1990). Kaid (1997) found that using a negative ad did affect the voter’s image of the
candidate, thus potentially influencing voting behavior. This presents a challenge for campaign
strategists. Positive ads lead to a more favorable impression of, but poorer memory for, the
candidate. On the other hand, negative ads increase recall but decrease approval of the
candidate.
Politicians in the media can also provide information in the form of reminders of our own
mortality. This might come in the reference to gruesome crime stories, threats of terrorism, or
news of epidemics. Terror management theory (Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg, 2003)
posits that such reminders of mortality can lead to more punitive judgments, the derogation of
others, and generally defensive behaviors. Many years of programmatic research (summarized
in Pyszczynski, et al, 2003) have supported the idea that the manipulation of mortality salience
leads to such behaviors. Some have used terror management theory for an explanation of the
success of U.S. President George W. Bush in his 2004 re-election campaign; by continually
speaking about the 9-11-01 attacks and the threat of future attacks, he kept the mortality salience
elevated, thus contributing to voters accepting his hard line internationally and refusing to
“change horses” in leadership. Landau, Solomon, Greenberg, Cohen, Pyszczynski, Arndt,
Miller, Ogilvie, and Cook (2004) performed several studies that forced participants in the United
States to contemplate death before reading a statement that cast Bush and his actions in a highly
positive light. Increasing mortality salience for participants led to more agreement with these
statements as well as more intention to vote for Bush. In contrast, when participants thought
about death their support for Presidential candidate John Kerry decreased, and these feelings of
29
support were independent of the participants’ political opinions. These results were replicated
when participants were provided reminders about the World Trade Center and September 11.
Media Literacy
In the early years of media effects research, investigators noticed the power of media in
bringing about change in the attitudes or beliefs of the consumer. This direct effects model of
media effects assumed large, immediate, and most often negative effects on the audience.
Although this paradigm dominated early media research, more recently researchers have viewed
media as having more modest effects, which depend greatly on the attention, comprehension,
memory, and perception of the consumer (Perse, 2001). A few people are heavily affected, a
larger number modestly affected, while many others are not affected at all. While these effects
can be moderated by the prior knowledge of the viewer (Petty, et al., 2002), a very important
moderator is the level of media literacy in the viewer (Johnson, 2001).
Media literacy involves the skill of questioning, appraising, and processing media,
whether video, audio, or print. The area of media literacy that most directly utilizes cognition is
the stage of analyzing and asking questions about the message. According to Johnson (2001),
once consumers interpret the meaning of a media message, the media-literate among them may
then use metacognitive skills to determine why the interpretation process led to that specific
meaning, including such factors as understanding the use of stereotypes and the motivations of
the producers. This may involve reflecting on the message while examining it from multiple
perspectives, all of which are clearly central, as opposed to peripheral, processing in the sense of
the Elaboration Likelihood model (Petty, et al., 2002). For example, Sagarin, Cialdini, Rice, and
Serna (2002) found that providing short training to participants might enable them to judge the
persuasiveness of authority appeals based on whether the authority has a legitimate reason to
30
provide information about the product. Participants receiving the training rated illegitimate
spokesmodels as less persuasive than did participants in the control group. This result was
enhanced when participants were shown that they themselves could fall prey to these types of
appeals.
Because the media use framing and other techniques to set their agenda, consumers must
develop a certain degree of media literacy in order to discover that agenda and fully comprehend
the information appearing in the media. This learning process must occur for each source the
consumer uses, in order to allow for full comprehension of both the new information and the
agendas behind it (Cohen, 1963). For example, if a regular viewer of Fox News suddenly turns
to CNN instead, she will experience a transition period before completely understanding which
issues, and which viewpoints on those issues i.e., its agenda, are given the most weight on the
new channel.
See Potter (2001) for a thorough discussion of various aspects of media literacy.
Case Study of Media Literacy: Misleading Advertising
One public policy media literacy issue clearly amenable to cognitive research is the
question of deceptive, or misleading, advertising. If consumers construct a meaning of an ad that
is at variance with the facts, they are deceived or misled (Burke, DeSarbo, Oliver, & Robertson,
1988; Harris, Dubitsky, & Bruno, 1983; Richards, 1990). Determining whether an ad is
misleading is not the same as assessing its literal truth. The truth of a claim may be resolved by
examining reality. Misleadingness, however, is a function of the understanding of the consumer.
It is thus a cognitive question and must be inferred from an assessment of a person’s
understanding of an ad. Some blatantly false statements in ads are unlikely to mislead anyone
(“Our cookies are made by elves in a tree”; “at these prices the cars will fly out the door”).
31
On the other hand, advertising that makes only true statements may mislead when the
consumer is led to infer unsubstantiated claims about a product that were never explicitly stated.
Several different types of linguistic constructions may mislead without actually lying by inviting
the consumer to infer beyond the information stated. One common class of true-but-potentiallymisleading claims are hedge words (e.g., may, could help), which weaken a claim without
denying it, e.g., “Scrubble Shampoo may help get rid of dandruff symptoms,” or “Rainbow
Toothpaste fights plaque.” Another common manner of implying false information is the
elliptical comparative, e.g., “Fibermunchies have more vitamin C,” or “Powderpower laundry
detergent cleans better,” without stating the standard to which the product is being compared.
A causal relationship may be implied when no more than a correlational one in fact
exists, as in the juxtaposition of two imperatives (“Help your child excel in school. Buy an
Apricot home computer” or “Shed those extra pounds. Buy the Blubberbuster massage belt.”) In
neither case does the ad state that buying the product will have the desired effect, but the causal
inference is easy to draw. Something unfavorable may be implied about a competitor’s products
or services, without stating so directly. For example, consumers may infer from statements like
“If we do your taxes and you are audited by the IRS, we will accompany you to the audit” or
“Our company gives refunds quickly if your traveler’s checks are lost or stolen” that the
competing companies do not provide the same service, whereas in fact they do.
Incomplete reporting of scientific evidence may also imply more than what is stated. For
example, “Three out of four doctors recommended Zayer Aspirin” would not be false if only four
people were questioned. Claiming that “2,000 dentists recommended brushing with Laser
Fluoride” without reporting the sample size is also potentially misleading. Our minds fill in the
missing information in ways favorable to the advertiser (Harris et al., 1983). Comparison
32
advertising may employ very selective attribute comparisons to imply a much more global
impression. For example, “The Egret Pistol has more front-seat leg room than a Dodge Intrepid,
more rear-seat headroom than a Nissan Maxima, and a larger trunk than a Toyota Camry” may
imply that the car has a more spacious interior on most or all dimensions than any of the
competitors.
In experimental studies, people do in fact make the inferences described and remember
the inferred information as having been stated in the ad (e.g., remembering that a toothpaste
prevents cavities when the ad only said it fights cavities). This stable finding occurs with a
variety of dependent measures and is increasingly strong with longer retention intervals between
exposure to the ad and the memory test (Burke, et al., 1988; Gardner & Leonard, 1990; Harris,
Pounds, Maiorelle, & Mermis, 1993; Harris, Trusty, Bechtold, & Wasinger, 1989; Russo,
Metcalf, & Stevens, 1981). Training people not to make such inferences is difficult, because the
tendency to infer beyond given information is very strong. However, training participants to
individually analyze ads, identify potential unwarranted inferences, and rewrite ads to imply
something more or less strongly, has some positive effect in teaching them to put a brake on this
natural inference-drawing activity (Bruno & Harris, 1980). Such research has direct implication
for media literacy programs.
Conclusion
As this chapter has shown, cognitive processes affect and are affected by one’s
experience with the media. As the media becomes more technologically advanced and
pervasive, researchers must continue to examine the possible effects of those media on
consumers. Examining how consumers attend to, comprehend, remember, evaluate, and act
upon the information presented in the media will provide greater understanding of the effects of
33
all types of media. One area of research that holds promise in this area is media literacy.
Although the potential exists for positive benefits from the media (e.g. learning about and
understanding people with whom one has no contact), there is also the danger of negative effects
(e.g. learning incorrect information). As former Federal Communications Commissioner
Nicholas Johnson said many years ago in reference to television, “All television is educational.
The only question is, ‘What is it teaching?’” (Liebert & Schwartzberg, 1977, p. 170).
Reference Note
Thanks are expressed to Stephan Lewandowsky, Tuan Tran, Nicole Peck, Kristen Geri, and two
anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Correspondence
may be addressed to rjharris@k-state.edu.
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