Exam 4: The Emergence of the Media-Effects Trend in Mass Communication Theory

Outrage-based content, for example much of talk radio and angry social network screeds, is selected by political partisans not so much for its attitude-confirming information as for its satisfaction of the social need to find community in safe ideological spaces.

The Lazarsfeld approach to theory construction, because it assumed that research should begin with empirical observation, is said to be ___.

Selective perception is people's tendency to attend to media messages they feel are in accord with their already-held attitudes and interests and the parallel tendency to avoid those that might create dissonance.

High-credibility communicators produce increased amounts of attitude change; low-credibility communicators produce less attitude change.

Persuasion research demonstrates that those who are more intelligent are typically less susceptible to persuasive arguments.

Selective exposure is our tendency to interpret messages, to make meaning from them, in ways that are consistent with the values, beliefs, and attitudes we already hold.

People who enjoy a somewhat heterogeneous circle of friends are exposed to cross-cutting (ideologically discordant) content.

Social scientists who developed media-effects theory and research during the 1940s and 1950s were primarily methodologists-not theorists.

One-sided messages are less effective with people already in favor of the message; two-sided presentations are also less effective with those holding divergent perspectives.

The largest category of subjects Lazarsfeld discovered in his voter study were early deciders.

Hovland's methodological advance, ______, was to take a piece of stimulus material (for example, a film) and systematically isolate and vary its potentially important elements independently and in combination to assess their effects on audience members undergoing similar variation.

Someone enjoying ideological homophily communicates with people from across the political spectrum.

Social categories theory assumes that there are broad collectives, aggregates, or social categories in modern societies whose behavior in the face of a given set of stimuli is more-or-less uniform.

Information that is consistent with a person's already-held attitudes creates psychological discomfort, or dissonance.

You and a friend watched the big game together and he is convinced that the refs were clearly favoring your team. But you watched the very same game with the very same refs and you are equally sure that the refs favored his team. Clearly, _______ is at work here.

Lazarsfeld concluded in his voter study that the most important influence of mass media was to ____________.

The media-effects trend, an approach to media theory and research that came to dominate how many U.S. researchers studied and thought about media in the last half of the 20^th century, viewed media as a powerful social and cultural force.

The Payne Fund research was the first well-funded effort to comprehensively study media effects using postpositivist methods.

The Payne Fund research on the effects of movies on children _____.

Which of the following is a generalization found in limited-effects theory?