CHALLENGING THE DOMINANT PARADIGM:Catharsis Social learning Social cognitive theory

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Theories of Communication MCM 511

LESSON 15

CHALLENGING THE DOMINANT PARADIGM

In today's session we will see how the growing violence and the possible contribution of the television

became a concern for the American society. Several different perspectives are discussed, including:

Catharsis

Social learning

Social cognitive theory

First the background and focus on children and violence. Society changed from a primarily rural

agricultural society to a highly urban nation dependent on an industrially base economy. People had

regular incomes. They had more money to spend on the leisure. More consumer goods were competing

in the market place. More and more need to advertise

Women entered into work force. It became more and more acceptable for both parents working outside

home. The traditional community anchors church and school- began to lose their dominance in the

social development of their children

The teenagers brought sharp increase in delinquency and crime. In the 1960s political changes

President John F. Kennedy Dr. Martin Luther King assassinated. New unfamiliar music rock music.

Sociologists discovered the existence of a `generation gap' between conservative, middle class parent

and their increasingly liberal, even radical children.

Media's role in all these change was hotly debated

Although social researchers and media practitioners typically argued from the limited effects

perspective, a new generation of critics charged that media were harming children and disrupting their

lives.

Particularly Television became the target of increasing criticism and the object of scientific inquiry,

especially where harmful effects were presumed. The debate rose between the ones who strongly

advocated the limited effects notions and those who were skeptical about their findings and accused

them of paid messengers of the media industries, where as the over zealots critics of the television were

accused of oversimplifying complex problems and ignoring alternative causes. The debate over media's

role in fomenting social instability and instigating violence reached a peak in late 1960s. The federal

government itself tried to locate new answers to this problem by establishing the Surgeon General's

Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and social behavior in 1969. The collection of scientists'

research concluded after two years and a million dollars of study.

It reported to a U.S. senate subcommittee:

"While the ... report is care fully phrased and qualified in language acceptable to social scientists , it is

clear to me that the causal relationship between televised violence and antisocial behavior is sufficient

to warrant appropriate and immediate remedial action. The data on social phenomena such as

television and violence and or aggressive behavior will never be clear enough for all social scientists to

agree on the formulation of a succinct statement of causality, But there comes a time when the data are

sufficient to justify action, that time has come.

President Johnson established a National Commission of the Cause and Prevention of Violence in 1968.

The Commission offered some serious criticisms of media and recommended a variety of changes in

both news reporting and entertainment content.

Commission's report in it preface stated that:

`if, as the media claim, no objective correlation exists between media portrayals of violence and violent

behavior-if, in other words, the one has no impact upon the other- then how can the media claim an

Theories of Communication MCM 511

impact in product selection and consumption , as they obviously affect the viewers commercial attitudes

and behaviour? Can they do one and not the other?'

This did not stop the controversy. But ultimately the industry agreed to a self-imposed family viewing

hour in which violent content was ostensibly minimized.

Television Violence Theories

The most important outcome of the violence research was the gradual development of a set of middle-

range theories that summarized findings and offered increasingly useful insight into the media's role in

the lives of children. The accumulated research clearly demonstrated a correlation between viewing

violence and aggressive behavior- that is, heavy viewers behave more aggressively that light viewers...

Both experimental and longitudinal studies supported the hypothesis that viewing violence is causally

associated with aggression.

CATHARSIS - JUSTIFICATION OF MEDIA VIOLENCE

Catharsis sometimes called sublimation- the idea that viewing violence is sufficient to purge or at least

satisfy a person's aggressive drive and, therefore, reduce the likelihood of aggressive behavior.

Catharsis suggested that television violence had social utility, providing young people with a harmless

outlet for their pent-up aggression and hostility. However critics called this a `phony argument'.

Common sense and your own media consumption offer some evidence of the weakness of the catharsis

hypothesis. When we watch families devouring chocolate cakes, does it purge you of your hunger

drive? If you walk out of a movie like Die Hard did you walk out of the theater a tranquil, placid

person? What scientist learnt that certain presentation so mediated violence and aggression can reduce

the likelihood of subsequent viewer aggression. But catharsis is not the reason.

Rather viewers LEARN THAT violence might not be appropriate in a given situation. Their aggressive

drive might not have been purged, but they might have simply learned that such treatment of another

human is inappropriate. Their inclination towards violence was inhibited by the information in the

media presentation. This leads us to the theory that is generally accepted as most useful in

understanding the influence of media violence on the individual social cognitive theory.

SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY

Social learning encompasses both imitation and identification to explain how people learn through

observation of other in their environments.

Imitation

IMITATION is the direct, mechanical reproduction of behavior. Supposing a viewer watches a violent

movie in which teenagers beat a policeman and the next day he does the same. This demonstrates

imitation. The problem for mass communication theorists, however, is that these obvious examples are

relatively rare. Moreover such gross examples support the argument t that negative effects occur only in

those `predisposed' to aggression.

Identification

Identification on the other hand is:

"A particular form of imitation in which copying a model, generalized beyond specific acts, springs

from wanting to be and trying to be like the model with respect to some broader quality."

Although there might be few who will imitate what they, there will be many who would like to be

identified with movies' characters. Imitation from media is clearly more dramatic and observable than is

identification. But identification with media models might be the more lasting and significant of the

media's effects.

Human learn from observation. The first serious look at learning through observation was offered by

psychologists Neal Miller and John Dollard in 1941. They argued that imitative learning occurred when

Theories of Communication MCM 511

observers were motivated to learn, when the cues or elements of the behaviors to be learned were

present, when observers performed the given behaviors, and when observers were positively reinforced

for imitating those behaviors. In other words, people could imitate behavior that they saw; those

behaviors would be reinforced and therefore learned.

There have been questions however about how much and what kinds of behaviors people learn from the

media. So instead of presenting a means of understanding how people learn from models (including

media models) Miller and Dollard simply described an efficient form of traditional stimulus-response

learning.

They assumed that individuals behaved in certain ways and then shaped their behavior according to the

reinforcement they actually received.

Imitation simply made it easier for an individual to choose a behavior to choose a behavior to reinforce.

The actual reinforcement, they argued, ensured learning.

But this insistence on the operation of reinforcement limited their theory's application for understanding

how people learn from the mass media.

The theory's inability to account for people's apparent skill at learning new responses through

observation rather than actually receiving reinforcement limited its applicability to media impact.

Learning theory

SO traditional learning theory asserts that people learn new behavior when they are presented with

stimuli (something in their environment), make a response to those stimuli, and have those responses

reinforced either positively (rewarded) or negatively (punished) . In this way new behaviors are learned,

or added to people's behavioral repertoire- the individual's available behaviors in a given circumstance.

SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY

Social theorists have advanced various theories about why people behave in the ways that they do.

Some say behavior is based upon a person's motivations. Other proposes that behavior is a response to

external stimuli and subsequent reinforcements.

Still others point out that people react differently in different situations, and these scholars feel that the

interaction between a person and situation produces a particular behaviour.

One theory in particular reappears time and again in media effects literature is SOCIAL COGNITIVE

THEROY.

According to Albert Bandura," social cognitive theory explains psychosocial functioning in terms of

triadic reciprocal causation , in this model of reciprocal determinism, behavior; cognitive, biological

and other personal factors; and environmental events all operate as interaction determinants that

influence each other bidirectionally.

This theory explains human thought and actions as a process of TRIDAIC RECIPROCAL

CAUSATION.

This means that THOUGHT AND BEHAVIOR are determined by three different factors that interact

and influence each other with variable strength, at the same or at different times:

1. Behavior

2. Personal characteristics such a s cognitive and biological qualities (e.g. Iq, sex, or race)

3. Environmental factors or events

Baundra's social cognitive theory of mass communication the broader social learning theory serve as the

foundations for volumes of research in all areas of media effects study-

· Effects of media violence

· And sexually explicit material

· Pro-social or positive media effects

· Cultivation effects

· Persuasion

Theories of Communication MCM 511

For the student of media effects, an understanding of Bandura's theory is therefore essential because the

serve as a common denominator among many other media effects theories and hypotheses.

Social cognitive theory emphasizes the importance of these uniquely human characteristics, known as

the

1. Symbolizing capacity

2. Self-regulatory capacity

3. Self-reflective capacity

4. Vicarious capacities (Bandura, 1994)

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