Assessing the Social Influence of Television

Abstract

Cultivation effects are discussed and assessed within the context of mental processing strategies. Specifically, an information-processing perspective is taken to illustrate how television viewing may affect social judgments. Heuristic processing is posited as a mechanism that can explain why heavier television viewing results in higher first-order cultivation judgments (i.e., those requiring estimates of set size, such as the incidence of violent crime or percentage of doctors in the workforce). Past cultivation findings are integrated into this framework, and new directions for research are proposed.