Mean World Syndrome

Cobalt_Kid

Council Member
Feb 3, 2007
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George Gerbner did extensive studies of the effect of violence in media and came to some interesting findings.

- Violence in media doesn't seem to have much effect of people's immediate behaviour, few people are directly inlfulenced by what they see on TV and in the movies.

- The more television that people watch the more fearful they are of the world around them. They tend to think that violence is more common that it really is.

- They are also easier to manipulate and will accept repressive actions by authorities more willingly if they believe it will improve their security.

Violence has been in a steady decline since the early 1990s in North America and yet people are more fearful now than before. On average a child will have seen 8000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence on TV and movies by the end of elementary school, so it's not hard to see where we're being encultured to be fearful of the world around us. In the US at a time when violent crime has been in a steady decline and has reached a 40 year low, gun sales and paranoia are at a peak.

Just a few corporations control the bulk of the media and as violence sells we get way more of it through media than happens in real life which can make people who rely on TV, especially local TV reporting in the US, think they are much more unsafe than they really are. This also has a racial component as Latinos, Blacks, Muslims and Arabs are portrayed as being violent much more than is factual.

Mean world syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Mean world syndrome" is a term coined by George Gerbner to describe a phenomenon whereby violence-related content of mass media makes viewers believe that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. Mean world syndrome is one of the main conclusions of cultivation theory. Gerbner, a pioneer researcher on the effects of television on society, argued that people who watched a large amount of television tended to think of the world as an intimidating and unforgiving place.[1]
The number of opinions, images, and attitudes that viewers tend to make when watching television will have a direct influence on how the viewer perceives the real world. They will reflect and refer to the most common images or recurrent messages thought to impact on their own real life. Gerbner once said "You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour," he said. "It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it's a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.".

Mean World Syndrome - Home

Mean World Syndrome is a phenomenon where the violence-related content of mass media convinces viewers that the world is more dangerous than it actually is, and prompts a desire for more protection than is warranted by any actual threat. Mean World Syndrome is one of the main conclusions of cultivation theory. The term "Mean World Syndrome" was coined by George Gerbner, a pioneer researcher on the effects of television on society, when he noted that people who watched a lot of TV tended to think of the world as an unforgiving and scary place.

Individuals who watch television infrequently and adolescents who talk to their parents about reality are said to have a more accurate view of the real world than those who do not, and they are able to more accurately assess their vulnerability to violence and tend to have a wider variety of beliefs and attitudes.
 

L Gilbert

Winterized
Nov 30, 2006
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People simply accept stuff without putting some thought into it, so I think Gerbner is probably correct. I think it'd do good for people if they listened to The Age of Persuasion and learned about some of the weasely ways they can be manipulated.