Assignment 4 - Reading and Reviewing

For assignment 4 I had to summarise one book and one journal taken from assignment 3 and write around 500 words explaining the main issues addressed from each source and the points which the author considered to be the most important, aswell as using a template as a guide. I took each source individually, and tried to highlight all the concepts I feel the author was trying to make. I found this task quite challenging but persisted with it until I was happy that I had made all the points I wanted to mention. If I was to repeat the same task I would search for texts that were not so challenging to read as trying to understand what the authors were saying was very difficult. For task 4b I had to write another 500 words discussing how each source contradicts, supports or advances each other. Aswel as that I tried to relate it to the topic in my previous assignment - 'interactive voting' and make links with my sources. At the end of the assignment I have added in what I would do next if I was to further research the topic. To finish the assignment off I had to add in another bibliography listing all the sources I referred to within the whole assignment in alphabetical order.


Source 1 -

Mares, M (1996) The Role Of Source Confusions In Television's Cultivation Of Social Reality Judgements

In this journal Marie-Louise-Mares discusses and considers the different reasons why heavy television viewers may adopt a distorted view of reality and how errors in memory play a big contribution towards this. People, whose perception of social reality is influenced by the television, may exaggerate when making social reality judgements. Often fact and fiction can be similarly portrayed and people may not remember whether the information is fictitious or fact-based. Mares questions why television viewers believe what they watch and then act on these visions of reality when making social judgements. In her opinion, backed up by an extensive experiment, heavy TV viewers, who make a high level of fiction-to- news confusions ( fiction remembered as news) are more likely to have TV biased views of social reality, particularly if they are certain about their views and they may come to accept a distorted version of social reality ( cultivation effect).

Mares looks into the different factors which can attribute to source confusion making reference to other peoples sources while carrying out her own research.

“Researchers have envisioned viewers who learn erroneous information from television and then use that information to make judgments about the real world.” (Hawkins, Pingree, & Adler (1987). This shows that television viewers may pick up mistaken information and then use that information to talk about real life situations.

“Viewers who had less trust in the realism and utility of television content were most affected by viewing.” (Potter, 1991) Some viewers may have difficulty distinguishing fact and fiction based programmes.

Shrum and O’Guinn (1993) asked several people to make some social reality judgements. As a result they discovered that people who watch a lot of television are more able to access quickly social reality information to make real world judgements. They also suggest being able to access the information is more important in making judgements than the accuracy of it or its source. Mares disagrees and argues that if people believe the information is from a reliable source, even if they make errors about it, they are more likely to use it as an accurate judgement. However, if it comes from an unreliable source, they will discard it and because it takes longer to find another example, the judgement is much less exaggerated.

As back- up, she refers to a test carried out by Strange (1993), who discovered that how people viewed a source of information affected their judgements about its believability and also that errors in source memory affected people’s accuracy in deciding what information was valid.

Mares made reference to the work of Shapiro and Lang (1991) who suggested that viewers may think something that they have seen on television actually happened, so confusing fiction with reality. (untested hypothesis)

To discover more about source confusions, she conducted an experiment for social reality issues eg violence, mean world, socioeconomic status, involving TV viewing habits and other predictive measures, adding in fiction-to-news or news-to-fiction confusions. These results were measured on scales used in previous studies to make comparisons to find out if errors in memory would predict people’s views about social reality. Other predictors of source confusion –age, visual aspect of viewing and time delay were incorporated into the tests. Results showed evidence of “the cultivation effect.” They supported her hypotheses- errors in fiction-to- news, especially those made with certainty, scored higher for social reality issues. Supported, but to a lesser extent, errors in news-to-fiction did have the opposing effect. These people are more likely to reject an example as unreliable.

Her results support the argument that when people misremember if what is seen on TV really happened their beliefs about the real world may be affected.

The results explained why (using the variety of measures) some people had more TV biased social reality scores and why some people had less TV biased thoughts. Being able to predict both these outcomes gives weight to the role of TV viewing in social reality judgements. Also, there was a strong link between viewing and beliefs among people who made high levels of fiction-to-news confusions and those who made low levels of news-to-fiction confusions.

Backed up by Strange’s findings, the author does point out the way people view the importance of the social reality issue may affect how much consideration they give to it, accepting the need for testing asking people how much they care or think about the issues they are judging.

I agree that people may think more rationally in an experimental situation, but do they apply the same thinking in their everyday lives as they do in response to experimenters’ questions?

It may be necessary to conduct more tests to find out about the sources of people’s deep-rooted beliefs and those which may be more changeable.

The implication for concern at the end is, that if television strengthens the cultivation effect that the world is a dangerous place, then people’s judgements may restrict what they do and affect how they view others.