Some Processes in the Cultivation Effect

Abstract

This article addresses several elaborations and specifications of Gerbner and Gross' (1976) cultivation hypothesis: that heavy television viewers incorporate biases present in television content into their own construc tions of reality. Subjects were 1280 children from grades 2, 5, 8, and 11 in Perth, Western Australia who answered questions designed to tap their perceptions of violence and "meanness" in society. The cultivation relation ship between viewing and beliefs was replicated with these Australian schoolchildren, but only for adolescents, suggesting that the integration of discrete television events into social reality beliefs requires cognitive skills not available to or unused by younger children. Division of children's viewing into different content types indicated that beliefs about violence stemmed most clearly from crime-adventure programs and cartoons, but perceiving a mean world is related more globally to all television viewing.