The establishment of the ‘limited
effects’ paradigm
End of the ‘powerful effects’ model
of media influence
Powerful effects model
• During the period from the turn of the century till the
mid-1940s, the predominant view of media effects
was that the media had a powerful influence over
their audiences and society. Media were able to tap
into the audience member’s unconscious, stir his
passions and get him to think and behave as the
message source wished.
– Freudian psychology
– Mass society theory
Limited effects model
• Beginning in the mid-1940s and lasting until
the mid-1960s a very different view of media
effects came to prevail—one that assigned a
much more limited impact to the mass media
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The American Soldier
Mr. Biggott studies
The People’s Choice and Voting
Klapper’s Effects of Mass Communication
WWII American Soldier studies
• Part of a large-scale social science investigation of
American soldiers recruited or drafted for service in
WWII
• This part especially interested in the effects of Frank
Capra’s propaganda films on the morale of new
recruits/draftees
– Why We Fight
– Documentary explanation of the buildup to and early years
of the war
Episodes taken from Why We Fight
• Prelude to War
• The Nazis Strike
• Divide and Conquer
• The Battle of Britain
Battle of Britain
• Men in two camps--some exposed to film,
some not
– 2100 in one camp (before/after control group)
– 900 in another camp (before/after control group)
– 1200 (after-only control group)
– Sampling by company units
• Units matched on several demographic variables
Battle of Britain
• Before and after questionnaires were slightly
different
– Tried to distract men from wondering why
answering twice by writing “revised” on the
questionnaire
• One week between exposure and after measure
• Anonymity was assured
Results
• The movies had a significant impact on factual
knowledge
• Ex. Why weren’t the Germans “successful at
bombing British planes on the ground”?
• Ans. “because the British kept their planes
scattered at the edge of the field”
• Experimental group: 78% correct
• Control group: 21% correct
Results: Learning from films
60
50
40
30
Test Score
20
10
0
Grade School
High School
College
Results
• Opinions and interpretations
– Effects were not as great
– “the heavy bombing attacks on Britain were an
attempt by the Nazis to . . .”
– Answer: “invade and conquer England”
• Experimental group: 58%
• Control group: 43%
Results
• Effects on general attitudes were slight
• “Do you feel that the British are doing all they
can to help win the war?”
– Experimental group 7% greater than control
– On several measures, only 2-3% positive
difference was found
Results
• Strengthening the overall morale and
motivation of viewers
• The series was ineffective
– Question concerning whether trainees would prefer
military duty in the U.S. or overseas
– Experimental group 41% overseas
– Control group 38% overseas
Results
• Unconditional surrender by Nazis is an
important war aim
– Experimental group 62%
– Control group 60%
Results
• 9 weeks after exposure
– Factual material was forgotten
• Retained only about 50% of factual items that 1-week groups
remembered
– On 1/3 of opinion issues, the long-term group showed less
change
– However, on more than half of the fifteen issues under
study, the long term group showed greater change than the
short-term group
• “Sleeper effect”
Hovland et al.
• Set up Yale school research on persuasion
• Study the effect of:
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Source characteristics
Message characteristics
Order of presentation
Psychological characteristics of audience
Source characteristics
• Credibility
– Topic: Atomic submarines
• Sources: J. Robert Oppenheimer/Pravda
– Topic: Future of Movie Theaters
• Sources: Fortune magazine/A woman movie gossip
columnist
– Greater persuasion with more credible source
• However, after 4 weeks difference had disappeared
Content
• Fear appeals
– The greater the fearfulness, the greater the effect
on interest, tension
– The less fearful messages had a greater effect on
intension to change behavior
– Fear appeals were thought to invoke some sort of
interference
Message
• Fear appeals
• You might expect that an appeal based on fear has to be hardhitting to be effective. However, a study conducted by Janis
and Feshbach in 1954 suggests that a minimal appeal is likely
to be more effective. They used three different versions of a
lecture on dental hygiene. The strong appeal provoked the
most tension in the audience, but the greatest change in
behavior in conformity with the message was produced by the
minimal appeal to fear.
• This probably suggests that when people feel they can do
nothing about the threat then they are not likely to change their
behavior.
Channel
• The main study here tends to indicate that
interpersonal channels are more effective at
changing attitudes than are mass media
channels.
• An excellent example of this is provided by
Kendall and Woolf's analysis of reactions to
anti-racist cartoons. The cartoons featured Mr
Biggott whose absurdly racist ideas were
intended to discredit bigotry. In fact 31%
failed to recognise that Mr Biggott was racially
prejudiced or that the cartoons were intended
to be anti-racist (Kendall & Wolff (1949) in
Curran (1990)).
• Another study referred to by Curran was conducted by Hastorf
and Cantril in 1954. Subjects were showed film of a
particularly dirty football match between Princeton and
Dartmouth and asked to log the number of infractions of the
rules by either side. The Princeton students concluded that the
Dartmouth players committed over twice as many fouls as
their team. The Dartmouth students concluded that both sides
were about equally at fault. The authors concluded that it is not
accurate to say that different people have different attitudes to
the same thing, as in fact, 'the thing is not the same for
different people, whether the thing is a football game, a
presidential candidate, communism or spinach.' As Curran
suggests, it might be more accurate to say 'believing is seeing'
rather than 'seeing is believing'.
Audience factors
• Scouts who valued group membership highly
were least influenced by speaker who
criticized wood craft learning
Personality
Personality variables such as self-esteem, anxiety
and depression have an influence on
persuasibility. Janis's research suggests that
people with low self-esteem are likely to be
relatively easily persuaded.
Overall conclusions
• Mass media are not as overwhelmingly
persuasive as the propaganda theorists
considered them
• Persuasive effectiveness varied by source of
the message, format of the message, audience
factors such as personality and channel of
communication
Columbia School
• Paul Felix Lazarsfeld emigrated from Austria to the U.S. in the
1930s.
– A mathematician
– Interested in the application of mathematics, especially the new
statistics, to study of social problems
• Set up research programs at Princeton (Radio Research
Bureau) and at Columbia (Bureau of Applied Social Research)
that combine study of practical problems with academic
methods of research
• Some of his first studies focused on audience size, reactions to
and use of radio programming
Features of the approach
• Interested in individual knowledge, attitudes and
behavior resulting from exposure to media messages
and campaigns
• Focus groups and/or surveys were the usual methods
of study
The People’s Choice
• Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet
• Study of 1940 election in Erie county, Ohio
• 20th Century--strong, commercially successful
newspapers, radio, mags, that had ability to say
what they wanted to in Western European
countries
Research Questions
1. How do people decide to vote as they do?
2. What were the major influences on them?
• "Social characteristics determine political preference."
• Lazarsfeld could predict with 76% accuracy which
candidate a person would vote for based on her
demographics. That was better than the people
themselves could predict.
– Prediction is taken as the criterion of validity
– "Cross-Pressures"
• Opinion Leaders (21%)
– ("Have you tried to influence someone on a political issue
recently?"; "Has anyone asked your advice recently on a
political issue?")
– opinion leaders were thought to be a rather small group of
influential people
• Evidence of actual influence was lacking
Media influence
Whenever a person in the sample changed his/her vote intention,
the interviewer asked why:
• Democrats mentioned radio most often (30% vs. 20% for
newspapers)
• Republicans mentioned newspapers (31% vs. 17% for radio).
• Over half the voters said the media had the
most important impact, 2/3 said news media
were helpful
• “Two-step flow”
• Conclusion--interpersonal communication
most important
• Those most likely to be predisposed to vote
Democratic were exposed to more pro-Democratic
propaganda
– the analogous situation was true for Republicans
• Lazarsfeld decided this showed ‘selective exposure’-those who were predisposed to vote one way or
another chose to expose themselves to propaganda
that was positive toward the preferred party
When did they choose?
• 1/2 made up their minds before May
• Once they knew the nomination, another 1/4
made up their mind
• 1/4 made up their mind between nomination
and election
• Columbia did another study in 1948, then got
out of campaign studies
– Voting, by Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee
• Since 1940, predictive power has decreased-SES, ethnicity, religion have declined
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Issues may now be more important
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--television has come in
• Generalizability?
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a. particular presidential campaign
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b. not looking at nonvoters
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c. not looking at influences outside of
campaign (nomination, etc.)
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d. formal education levels have increased
since that time
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e. professionalization of campaigns
Katz and Lazarsfeld
• Personal influence: The two-step flow of
communication
– Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955)
• Decatur study of opinion leaders conducted by the
Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia
Assessing opinion leaders’ role in four areas of
influence:
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1. marketing
2. fashion
3. public affairs
4. film choice
• Talked to women in Decatur about where they went
to get advice on the topics
• Women acted as opinion leaders in a topic area
depending on their position in the life cycle, SES,
social contacts
Other research
• Prejudice studies
– Prejudiced and non-prejudiced individuals read
anti-racist cartoons
• Information campaigns
– Cincinnati United Nations campaign
• Persuasion studies
• Political effects surveys
Klapper’ Five Generalizations
• 1. Mass communication ordinarily does not
serve as a necessary and sufficient cause of
audience effects, but rather functions among
and through a nexus of mediating factors and
influences.
• 2. These mediating factors are such that they typically
render mass communication a contributory agent, but
not the sole cause, in a process of reinforcing the
existing conditions.
• 3. On such occasions as mass communication
does function in the service of change, one of
two conditions is likely to exist. Either:
– a. the mediating factors will be found to be
inoperative and the effect of the media will be
found to be direct; or
– b. the mediating factors, which normally favor
reinforcement, will be found to be themselves
impelling toward change.
• 4. There are certain residual situations in
which mass communication seems to produce
direct effects, or directly and of itself to serve
certain psycho-physical functions.
• 5. The efficacy of mass communication, either
as a contributory agent or as an agent of direct
effect, is affected by various aspects of the
media and communications themselves or of
the communication situation (including, for
example, aspects of textual organization, the
nature of the source and medium, the existing
climate of public opinion, and the like).
Selectivity
• Notions of selectivity are a movement away from notions of
mass society. It reflects a more sophisticated understanding of
social organization. These three levels of selectivity represent
somewhat different levels of analysis which reflect the
influence and development of the disciplines which
contributed to the knowledge and development of mass
communication research.
• this type of research contributed to the notion that the mass
media have only limited effects
• because they were looking only at short-term effects
• reliance on experimental methodology