TV is evil..

[shadowkat]

Some interesting television statistic from a study conducted by George Gerbner, bolstered by samplings of viewers from all age groups, incoms, education etc. (Aronson, E, "The social animal." Ninth edition.)

Did you know "the average American (the study was of Americans) watches 30 hours of television a week - that's a little over 1500 hours a year. 37,800 commercials or more than a 100 a day. Average high school grad spends more time today in front of a tv set than in a classroom.

Also television tells you lies. Males outnumber females on tv 3 to 1 (interesting since population wise it's actually the opposite.) Women are depicted as younger and less experienced than the men they encounter on television. Nonwhites (especially Latinos and Asian Americans) and the elderly are underrepresented, and members of minority groups are disproportionately cast in minor roles. Moreover, most prime-time characters are portrayed as professional and mangerial workers: Although 67 percent of the workforce in the US is employed in a blue-collar or service job, only 25 percent of the television characters hold such jobs. (One of the reasons I like Dead Like Me, more non-professional jobs). Crime on TV is at least 10 times as prevalent as in real life. Over half of tv's characters are involved in a violent confrontation each week; in reality, less than 1 percent of Americans are victims of criminal violence in any given year, according to FBI statistics."

As David Rintels, a television writer and former president of Writer's Guild of America summed up "From 8 to 11'o clock each night, television is one long lie."

In Gerbner's study - he found that "TV watching heavily influenced the attitudes of viewers sampled. (Doesn't have to convince, I've seen similar results in posts online.). Heavy viewers express more racially prejudiced attitudes, overestimate the number of people employed as physicians, lawyers, and atheletes, 3, percieve women as having more limited abilities and interests than men, 4, hold exaggerated views about the prevalence of violence in society, and believe old people are fewer in number and less healthy today than they were 20 years ago. When the opposite is true.

Heavy viewers see the world as a more sinsister place than light viewers; they are likely to agree that most people are just looking out for themselves and would take advantage of you if they had the chance."

Other interesting stats: the average 15 year old has seen over 13,000 television killings. For most of us tv is virtually our only vivid source of info about crime. Ask yourself which statement is true:

1. Police officers are effective, solve most crimes, and are infalliable. The wrong person never ends up in jail.
2. Police officers have difficult jobs, aren't always effective, solve 30% of crimes, and innocent people occassionally are in jail.

1. Criminals turn to crime because of psychopathology or insatiable and (unnecessary) greed.
2. Criminals turn to crime due to societal-economic issues such as unemployment, depression, poverty, etc.

Oh and..."the incidence of larceny (theft) increases when tv is introduced into an area.. The most reasonable explanation is that television promotes the consumption of good through advertisements; it also depicts upper- and middle-class lifestyles as the norm. The illusion of widespread wealth and consumption may frustrate and anger deprived viewers who compare their lifestyles with those portrayred on tv, thereby motivating them to "share in the American dream" any way they can.

While I don't necessarily agree with everything stated above. The bit about crime for instance, I think tv actually does show us that police officers aren't always effective and the wrong person ends up in the slammer, certainly has on the shows I've seen. But I do agree with the last statement and the one about violence.
Too much of it. Have made a pact with myself - I am not watching any tv show whose main focus is solving the crimes of or tracking serial killers, I'm sick of the genre. Tired of seeing gruesome kidnappings and crimes and deaths each week. So this more or less cancels out the following shows: MEdium, Bones, CSI, Law & Order's, Killer Intent, Criminal Minds, Supernatural.) I'm making an exception for Nip/Tuck - because it's not really about that and just using a metaphor. Same with shows who may occassionally do it, but clearly not a focal point.

Shows I plan to check out:

Threshold
Invasion
Veronica Mars
Lost (difficult to do both, but may try)
House
Gilmore Girls
My name is Earl
Kitchen Confidential
Arrested Development
Desperate Housewives
West Wing
Grey's Anatomy
Nip/Tuck
Reunion (didn't like that much, but may give it another chance)
Alias (not crazy about it, but may give another chance)
Smallville (not thrilled, but curious about JM appearance)

That's it.

Comments

[superplin.livejournal.com]

Gerbner's work is not unproblematic, however. Among (many, many) other things, his work doesn't control for any factors other than television viewing. Who is likely to be watching more than 15 hours of television a week: a highly educated professional with an upper-middle-class income, or someone who has a low-paying job (or no job) and less money to spend on leisure and cultural activities? What sorts of different social, political, and neighborhood/geographic contexts are these people likely to inhabit? Etc. etc.; there's a lot more going on there than what meets the eye.

Another problem I have with Gerbner is the same one I have with content analysis in general: the coding schemes are by nature acontextual. So, say, someone hitting another person will be coded as an act of violence, whether it was a truly aggressive behavior or a playful punch. On the other hand, many forms of verbal intimidation or abuse would go unremarked (unless they involved shouting or swearing, which are of course only a couple of forms of verbal aggression). The attitudinal questionnaires are pretty dicey, too, so should be taken with a whole canister of Morton's.

The problem is that his work has a great deal of what's called "surface validity": people hear the results and nod and say, oh yeah, I can see how that's true. Gerbner also had the merit of being the first to study television viewing habits systematically over time, and link them to attitudes and behaviors (with special emphasis on the effects of television violence on children, a topic that many are naturally concerned about). So his work has been widely cited and often reported upon, despite the fact that it suffers from a lot of methodological and interpretive problems.

Sorry to get so geeky on you, but you know, that's what happens to you when you study this stuff. I think I need an icon that says "Nerd Alert!". ;)

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I should have mentioned that Aronson made a note that Gerbner's research was correlationsl, not experimental (p.88 of the Social Animal). Stating that " it is impossible to determin whether heavy viewing actually causes prejudiced attitudes and inaccurate beliefs or whether people already holding such attitudes and beliefs simply tend to watch more television."
This was stated before mentioning how Gerbner bolstered the study.

The problem with social psychology as with any scientific experimentation is even when you control all the variables, you can't possibly conceive of all the situational exceptions.

We make assumptions based on scientific results or personal experience or observation, yet in every case, someone out there will throw us a curve ball or negative result screwing up the conclusion. It's why I think psychology is often considered an inexact discipline. But then I'd state that the study of human beings in general would be. People don't fit neatly in boxes, no matter how hard we try to wedge them.

While Gerbner's results may not necessarily be conclusive, they are interesting and I can see some validity in them. Be interested to see what people in my class have to say about it though. It's undergrad and I'm just auditing, so no where near the level you're at. Just checking out my interest before I dive into the whole school thing again.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Oh no, need to worry about the nerdyness. I appreciate the response. I'm unfamiliar with Gerbner's research (very new to this area of psychology) so happy to have the input.

The only psychology course I've taken prior to this was in 1986 and 1988 and it was the behavorists - Skinner, Pavolve, the people into chemical responses and biological reactions. The difficulty with my undergrad school was there was very little if any emphasis on the non-behavorists or other areas of psychology. So coming to it a bit late in the game.
Quite fascinating.

[superplin.livejournal.com]

It's weird for me to think of Gerbner being taught in the context of a psychology class, I guess because I think of his research as so broad as to be mostly useless more sociological, if anything. Although I suppose the line between social psych and sociology is awfully blurry.

It's interesting what you say about your prior experience with psychology classes. I had a year of social psychology in high school (although that was in Australia, so possibly the trends were different there) in 1982, and then a semester of general intro psych as a freshman in college (1983). Both classes made some mention of behaviorism, but mostly in the context of saying that it was old research and had mostly been rendered obsolete. So it's very surprising that you studied it later and had the opposite approach. Was it a class specifically in experimental psych, by any chance?

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

No, the first class was "Intro to Psychology" and I deliberately took it from a professor, Doug Freed, who was one of the few non-behavorists.
The Undergrad that I attended had a huge turnover in psyche students (I was an English Major), partly because the department was slanted towards behavorism and experimental psychology and disapproved of social/non-experimental psychology. In my intro class for example - we had to train a rat to run through a maze, I have yet to meet anyone from another university who took an intro to psyche course that had to do that. The second course was heavily experimental - human psychophysiology, it entailed testing lie detector tests. I think one of the reasons I did not pursue Psychology as an undergrad or grad was that my experience was so negative in undergrad - I despised the behavorists, wasn't until later that I learned from people who attended other schools that this was not necessarily what psychology was about.

(These courses were taught respectively in 1986 and 1987 in Colorado.)

The line between sociology and social psychology is a tad blurry. They told us the difference in class - sociology is more concerned with external or the group's actions on culture, while social psych is more interested on cultural or group influences on the individual. How the individual reactes to the group. (Or something like that.) Have taken two sociology classes as well, sociology tends to annoy me for some reason, could have been the teachers. What's interesting about this course is when I went to hunt the books for it - I was told to hunt in the sociology section, even though both were found in psychology. Gerbner was referenced by Aronson but with a disclaimer, so Aronson found him interesting from a social psychological perspective, while from a sociological perspective he seems to be inaccurate. I'm wondering if the difference is based on the study? Another interesting factor about 15% of the students taking my course are on the social worker tract at the New School.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Just a quick jump in to say that raincitygirl on my flist just mentioned that she has gluten-sensitivity problems, and when I asked she said she'd be happy to be contacted. She's Canadian, but may have ideas for non-gluten brands that may be available the NE USA as well.