How movies/TV help to change social norms (for better or worse)

by marycw on January 22, 2009

The New York Times had a recent article on how evolving roles for black actors in the movies may “in a modest way” have contributed to the Obama Phenomena –  the idea being that seeing black actors as fictional US presidents (a la Deep Impact and 24) help us get comfortable with the real thing.

It’s an eternal debate:  “media as angel of social change” versus “media as degrader of good behavior.”    For every media optimist who points to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and  Will and Grace as proof that mass media can promote tolerance and social equality — there’s a media pessimist who points to studies on excessive TV viewing by children contributing to “poor grades, sleep problems, behavior problems, obesity and risky behavior” and that unhappy adults watch more TV than happy adults. ( Love this website design by Turn Off Your TV –  “Filling their Minds With Death,”  complete with dripping blood.)

There’s not a simple cause-and-effect with media:  seeing Dennis Haysbert as President Palmer in 24 didn’t make people reflexively vote for Obama, any more than fans of horror movies are more likely to chainsaw people.  Yet humans are social animals and we are strongly influenced by what we observe.  Here’s three ways that visual media influences people:   1) habituation, 2) social norms, 3) exposure to other (sub)cultures and ways of life:

1) Habituation.  When repeatedly exposed to something that disturbs them, people become less reactive over time.  It’s the same principle behind desensitization therapy to help people get over their phobias.  This is a deep trait:  it’s not only psychological but biological (it’s the core concept behind allergy shots).  You see it in everyday life, when people who live by train tracks swear that they don’t even hear the trains anymore.

2) Social norms. Humans as social beings are highly sensitive to messages about what’s “normal behavior” for “people like us/me.”   We learn about norms more from non-verbal signs than from explicit teaching about rules — which makes movies/TV (visual storytelling media) particularly effective.  (ChangingMinds.org has a summary of the types of norms here.)

Of course, this has a negative side as well — in the competition to capture audiences, media often emphasize  sensational stories, giving viewers the impression of greater conflict and dangers in the world than exist in reality.  Thus Americans worry about safety issues when traveling overseas (terrorists! drug lords! third world prisons!); meanwhile, people in other countries worry about traveling to the US (mafia!  street gangs!  gun violence!).

3) Exposure to other cultures and ways of living.   Media provide a window into other lives — some fictional, some real, all mediated (which has its own issues).  But to the viewer at an unconscious level — real or fictional, it all looks the same, and it’s all hitting those same social animal buttons around norms and expected behaviors.

This influence can be negative (as various studies have shown — see media pessimists above) but it can also be positive:  for example, Indian Prime Minister Singh recently stated his belief that gross income inquality will become increasingly less tolerated in India because “the electronic media carries the lifestyles of the rich and famous into every village and every slum.”

Bottom line for me: visual media are a powerful influencing  tool, and like other powerful human tools, media have both positive and negative effects.

Further reading:

Lots of great stuff out there — type in “media influence” at Amazon or a search engine.  Here are a few that I like:

Jenning Bryant’s collection Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research (Lea’s Communication Series) is a tome that summarizes the current state of the discipline, with contributions from many experts in the field.

Thomas de Zengotita in Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It talks about the dark side of the media, of a media-drowned world where regular people start behaving like actors playing a part, and we lose the ability to distinguish “the real-real to the unreal-real.”

Karen Sternheimer’s book It’s Not The Media: The Truth About Pop Culture’s Influence On Children talks about how media often becomes a convenient scapegoat for adult fears about societal changes and the eternal uncertainties of raising children.

Gerard Jones’ Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence
says that story violence fills a  psychological need for children, and that children can be taught by adults how to manage the media in their lives (rather than assuming children are passive victims of media).

Utne Reader article Do Ask, Do Tell: TV talk shows may be crass and voyeuristic, but they give a voice to those who have been silenced.   Argument that part of the appeal of TV talk shows is that they give a podium to people who are ordinarily not the subjects of mainstream media.

Deborah Tannen in The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words says the US is not setting healthy expectations for its citizens in its media emphasis on dramatic confrontation.

Susan Douglas in  Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media talks about media images of women over the past 50+ years, showing how the media can be “both a liberating and an oppressive force” (from the Publishers Weekly review.).