Terms and Definitions
The independent contribution that media viewing and consumption make to people's conception of social reality.
What is cultivation?
This theory suggests that mediated messages influence how recipients perceive the world they live in.
What is cultivation theory?
The two types of media consumers.
What are heavy and light consumers?
The result of inaccrate representitions in television and the media.
What is a distorted worldview?
What is mean world syndrome?
This group of consumers is most likely to be influenced by the content of the media they encounter.
What are heavy viewers?
Television portrayals over-represent this, contributing to the mean world syndrome.
What is violence?
Two of the areas that cultivation can impact.
The effects of media content on recipients immediately following behaviors or judgments.
What is priming?
The two types of influences media consumption can have on individuals.
What are direct and indirect influences?
In relation to romantic relationships, media consumption increases the likelihood of this inaccurate perception.
What is believing that healthy relationships do not entail conflict?
These types of inferences are rarely drawn from nonexperimental research in cultivation theory because they do not track change over time and use one-contact surveys.
What are causal inferences?
The notion that individuals form beliefs about phenomena and issues based on instances that they experience directly or witness indirectly, possibly through media depictions.
What is exemplification?
The assumption that specific content types of TV (genres) portray a particular segment of the real world and have an impact on viewers' perceptions.
What is genre-specific cultivation?
A result of viewers processing TV entertainment in a heuristic fashion.
What is an inability to disregard fictional messages as irrelevant?
This suggests that causalities between media message consumption and consumer behaviors or attitudes are not well supported by the manifold cultivation research.
This model suggests that people base their estimates of the prevalence of a phenomenon on the ease with which they can remember related instances.
What is the heuristic processing model of cultivation effects?
The reason why cultivation is a "steady, pervasive process."
What are researchers viewing the process as a change in worldviews in society over time in response to media messages?
The key proposition of the heuristic processing model of cultivation effects suggests individuals use this to form estimates of real-world occurrences.
What is the availability heuristic?
This proposition of cultivation theory is challenged as a response to increased access to media options and genres.
What is attending to TV nonselectivly?