The Psychology of Television

John Condry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351226769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume addresses the content of television -- both programs and advertisements -- and the psychological effects of the content on the audience. The author not only reports new research, but explains its practical applications without jargon. Issues are discussed and described in terms of psychological mechanisms and causal routes of influence. While primarily referring to the American television industry and American governmental regulations, the psychological principles discussed are applicable to television viewers world wide.

Part 1
Essential Facts and Initial Effects

In order to begin the study of the psychological influence of television, it is first necessary to become acquainted with certain basic facts about television itself. We need to know what television is, who watches it, and why. We also need to know what people see when they watch television. These fundamental questions are essential to an understanding of the topic.

When was television invented, and what happened when it was first introduced into society? What kind of industry grew up around television? What do people in this industry do, how do they make their money? To what extent is the television industry regulated by the government, by what federal agencies, and with what history of success or failure? In short, if we are to try to understand the influence of television on human beings, we must first begin by describing what we mean by "television."

When responding to the question "what is television?" three different answers seem appropriate and true. First, television is a device for receiving pictures and sound broadcast over the air. If I say "was that shown on television?" you would know I meant the device, the machine. This machine, like all machines, has a history and a structure; it has certain limitations and certain strengths. The device was invented at a certain time in human history, and later it was distributed across society. Once television became widely available, it was immediately embraced by the population. The device gained an audience and thereby a degree of importance.

But television is secondly an industry, as in the phrase "Television is responsible for the huge salaries paid to sports stars...." The television industry has emerged in order to program, or use, the device. This industry, the "broadcast industry," includes radio from which television derived its history and form.

Finally, television is what is shown on the device, designed by the industry. That is, television is all of the programs, the commercials, and the rest of the visual and verbal clutter that together fill up all the time during the "broadcast day."

This last definition of television in terms of its content is, in fact, the most difficult to get a handle on, the hardest to pin down. Television (the device) and television (the industry) are both understandable, given that they remain much the same over time. But television (the content), the programs and ads, changes with some regularity.

It is impossible, therefore, to describe television and television effects without being clear about which of these three aspects of television (the device, the industry, the content) we mean. Except for the first two chapters (which discuss the history and audience of television) and chapter 8 on regulation of the industry, I refer to the content of television and its effects on viewers.

In the first chapter in this section, we see how television as a device for the broadcast transmission of voice and pictures was invented in the mid-1920s and introduced into American society shortly after the end of World War II (in the late 1940s and the early 1950s). Like radio, it became immediately popular; within a decade television reached almost 90% of the homes in the country. Television appealed to an even wider range of the population than radio had because, unlike radio, it was powerfully attractive to children. This fact, in the long run, led the American government to the only serious attempt it has ever made to regulate the content of television, that part of it which is directed to children.

Television (the device) is a powerful tool of mass communication in part because of this wide appeal. It also provides much more information than radio (with its rich visual images), and requires less education in order to be understood than the print media (newspapers and magazines) do. Since its beginning, broadcasting has been used primarily as a marketing device in the United States, and due to the size of its audience, television is the most powerful of such devices ever invented. Since the early days of radio, broadcast media have served the primary function of providing an audience to advertisers. By the time that television was introduced to American society, the economics, structure, and regulation of the broadcast industry were already well established. The primary job of the industry was to program the device with the kind of material that would draw and hold large audiences for a limited period of time. All other considerations are secondary to this one in the broadcasting industry as it has developed in the United States.

There is nothing inherently right or wrong with this, but it is a fact that is important to keep in mind. Among other things, it helps to explain much of what people in the television industry do, by underlin ing what gods they serve and what outcomes they value. In this respect it is worth noting that the broadcasting industry is not the same every where. In some countries the broadcasting media, both radio and television, are run by the government, publicly rather than privately funded, and in these countries they are not primarily used as marketing devices. In these countries television carries no advertising. In other countries, the advertising messages are clumped together and shown at one time of the broadcast day, without periodic interruptions of the program ming. In some places television is broadcast only in the evening, whereas in others it goes on around the clock. In other words, across the planet there are many different forms of the broadcast industry, and many different ways of using the device of television.

In this book I concern myself primarily with broadcasting as it has developed in the United States. With rare exceptions, most of the research I describe was conducted in the United States, and was meant to apply to American television. Therefore, when I talk about the television industry, I mean the American television industry; when I talk about government regulation, I mean the American government's regulation of the American television industry. However, the psychological principles that are outlined in this book should apply to the influence of television anywhere, not just in the United States.

When television was first introduced into this country it had certain initial consequences in terms of the redistribution of time that I call "indirect effects." So the first social consequences of television have to do with the fact that it represents a new demand on a limited supply—the time available in the day. This, in turn, leads to other social consequences. Television has a powerful effect on the amount of time spent reading, which can turn out to be a serious problem with children. We consider these indirect effects as part of the history of television in chapter 1.

After we have considered the history of the device and the industry in the first chapter, the next broad and most basic set of questions concern the audience for television. When television was introduced it became immediately popular. But popular with whom? Who watches it? When? For what reasons?

In terms of psychological influence, television might have little or no impact if only a few people pay relatively little attention to it. But the opposite is the case: Just about everybody watches some television, it has almost universal appeal, A more detailed analysis of the television audience reveals several interesting facts about who watches what, and why. We consider these questions in chapter 2. The first basic principle of influence has to do with exposure. Although the relationship is not perfecdy linear, in general the more exposure the more influence. Certainly the more exposure the more potential for influence. Although almost everyone is exposed, one of the most important things to learn from the study of the audience of television is that different slices of the total audience, different categories of people (men, women, children, etc.), watch different categories of programming at different times, and thus are exposed to different information both in terms of programs and ads.

In summary, it is an essential fact about television that the audience is quite substantial in terms of numbers, and is, for the most part, selective in its viewing and thus in the features of the television environment to which it is exposed. On the other hand, a wide range of the audience is exposed during the "prime-time" viewing hours and much of the research on the content of television has focused on this part of the broadcast day.

This brings us to the last definition of television. Most statements made about the effects of "television" refer to television content—the programs and the ads. Television is what television does: entertain, inform, and persuade. The content of television is drama, soap opera, religion, game show, news, situation comedy, sports, advertisements, promotions for upcoming material, public service announcements, and so forth. We devote all of chapter 3 and most of chapter 7 to the study of the content of television.

Television content is difficult to define in part because the content is constandy changing. There are many reasons for this, the most important of which is that the audience is easily bored and the industry must keep gathering and holding the audience. The audience is attached, via the ratings services, to a feedback loop reaching into the corporate offices of the industry whose job it is to program the device. In a real sense, the content of television is responsive to the changing tastes and prejudices of the audience.

In 1961, to the consternation of network executives, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Newton Minow, complained that "television is a vast wasteland." Whether or not that was true (or still is), trying to get a fix on the content of television is a little like trying to map the desert. The winds of change are constantly blowing, and much of what was true at one time will not be true a short time later. Most of what I have to say in this book was true of television in the middle 1980s. By the time this book is published some part of it will no longer be exact in terms of the content.

In chapter 3 on television program content, we look first at the kinds of programs that have been popular (and those that have lost popularity) over the years since television was first introduced. We take a particularly sharp look at the kinds of programs that have been designed for and directed toward children, because their youthful vulnerability makes them particularly susceptible to the information on television.

Viewing the content of television, however, as a set of programs falling within certain categories of programming (and how those appeal to different segments of the viewing audience) is more important to broadcasters and communication specialists than it is to psychologists, From a psychological point of view, the content of television presents an environment that contains certain kinds of information that may be understood by human beings with certain cognitive capacities and certain interests.

In other words, both psychologists and communication specialists are interested in detailed information about the content of television, but for different reasons. Media analysts are often concerned with why television presents the information and portrayals that it does, and how such presentations change according to their popularity with viewers. Although psychologists certainly acknowledge that the information presented on television generally reflects the tastes and attention of the viewers (rather than an accurate reflection of the "real world"), we consider this to be irrelevant in terms of the effects that such portrayals may have on the beliefs and actions of viewers. Regardless of whether the information is presented as fiction or nonfiction, true or not, it is still information to which television viewers are exposed that they may incorporate into their knowledge structures.

For psychologists, then, the most important questions about the content of television concerns the nature of the information presented, and how that information compares to similar kinds of information presented in the other environments to which human beings are exposed. For example, how does the information on television compare to that of everyday life? In portraying a community, a workplace, or a family (even when such portrayals are only fictional), what distortions or biases occur in the television information when compared with the same phenomena in the real human world?

To answer these questions, chapter 3 presents studies of the content of television that use the technique of content analysis. In doing a content analysis, a quantitative study is made of the relevant aspects of the programs or ads (e.g., occupational roles for males and females), and when possible the results are compared to quantitative statistical...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PART I ESSENTIAL FACTS AND INDIRECT EFFECTS
• PART II THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TELEVISION: PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISMS OF INFLUENCE
• PART III REGULATIONS AND SPECULATIONS
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index