MEDIA AND INTERGROUP

RELATIONS: RESEARCH ON MEDIA

AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Authored By:

Nichole Argo Shamil Idriss

Mahnaz Fancy

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Foreword 4

Introduction 6

Key Concepts for Group Affiliation and Inter-Group Relations:

• Social Identity and Self-Esteem 10

AOCMF-Supported Research & Literature Review 12

A History of Relevant Media Impact Research 13

• Early Research: General Media Effects 13 • Recent Media Research: Mechanisms of Social Impact 16

Media & Polarization: Stereotypes, Worldview, Hostility/Aggression

• Stereotypes 19 • Worldview 21 • Violent Media and Aggression 22

Media and Reconciliation: Attitudes and Empathy 23

• Attitudes 23 • Empathy 24Alliance of Civilizations Media Fund (AOCMF) 26Supported Laboratory Collaborations

Findings 28

Conclusion 34

About the AOCMF-Funded Research Laboratories 38

Bibliography 40

CONTENT PAGE

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ForewordWHAT DOES THIS PUBLICATION COVER?This publication is the result of a two-year effort by the non-profit Alliance of Civilizations Media Fund (AOCMF, re-named Soliya as of October 2009) to better understand the impact that media has – and could have – on cross-cultural understanding and intergroup relations. It features:

• the results of a literature review covering the past 60 years of research into the impact of media on attitudes and behavior

• a brief presentation of the preliminary findings of new research that explores the impact of media on intergroup attitudes and relations, which was funded by the AOCMF in 2008-2009 and which is being conducted and written up at neuro-imaging and psycho-physiology labs at Harvard University, MIT, and the New School for Social Research.

WHY IS THIS BEING PUBLISHED?Our hope is that this publication will inform and support the efforts of media industry leaders, non-profit organizations, donors, and policy-makers already using media for social change. We hope it will also contribute to the growing field of media literacy education by raising the awareness of media producers, distributors, and consumers alike regarding how media influences our attitudes and behaviors.

Finally, we hope this publication may inform the on-going, increasingly international, and often polarized debate over whether and where to draw limits around the freedom of expression in the media by shedding light on what kind of impact the media actually has and how it has it.

WHO IS PUBLISHING THIS?The Alliance of Civilizations Media Fund (AOCMF) was established as a non-profit organization in 2008 dedicated to using media to foster greater cross-cultural understanding. During the process of preparing this publication – and in part as a result of the research findings reported upon here - the AOCMF merged with Soliya, a non-profit industry-leader in using new media to foster greater cross-cultural understanding. Soliya is integrating the research results noted in this report into its programs and has formed an on-going research

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and evaluation partnership with the Saxe Neuro-Imaging Laboratory at MIT. The Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF) – reflecting its long-standing commitment to supporting media that advances cross-cultural understanding – generously offered to translate this publication into Arabic and disseminate it at the 2009 Dubai International Film Festival.

We at Soliya are deeply grateful to the leadership at DIFF for their support in translating, publishing, and disseminating this report.

Background of the Alliance of Civilizations Media Fund and the Research Presented Here

The idea to establish a fund that would support media that fosters greater cross-cultural understanding was put forth in the Final Report to the UN Secretary-General of the Alliance of Civilizations High Level Group (November 2006). This High Level Group consisted of 20 eminent personalities who had been appointed by UN Secretary-general Kofi Annan and tasked by him with producing a report on the causes of growing cross-cultural polarization, particularly between Western and predominantly Muslim societies, and recommending practical steps that should be taken to counter this trend.

Already working toward the establishment of a fund for this purpose and further encouraged by the recommendation in the AOC High Level Group’s report to the UN Secretary-General, a small group of media industry leaders and philanthropists led by Suhail Rizvi, Omar Amanat, Jim Berk, and Mike Abbott established contact with the UN Alliance of Civilizations. Her Majesty Queen Noor and Sir Richard Branson co-hosted a planning meeting in November 2007 and, two months later, Queen Noor announced the establishment of the Alliance of Civilizations Media Fund (AOCMF) at the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations Forum held in Madrid, Spain in January 2008.

The first step taken by the AOCMF was to support both a literature review as well as original research into the impact that media has on intergroup relations. The new research was conducted at neuro-imaging, psycho-physiology, and psychology laboratories at Harvard University, MIT, and the New School for Social Research and the preliminary findings are summarized in the latter part of this publication following the literature review.

Shamil IdrissCEO, Soliya

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IntroductionInterest in the impact of media on the “real world” is as old as media itself. Throughout history, the introduction of new media technologies and platforms – print, radio, silent film, “talkies”, television, and now Internet and “new” media technologies – has been accompanied by renewed debate about and research into media’s impact on society.

Often this interest has been driven by fears that media may have an inflammatory, polarizing, radicalizing, or even violence-inducing effect on those who consume it. The panic and chaos sparked by Orson Welles’ 1938 broadcast of the radio-drama War of the Worlds, in which a Martian invasion of Earth was chronicled, led to a U.S. Congressional inquiry examining the potentially dangerous impact of media on social order and public safety and whether anything could or should be done to regulate against it. The scenario would be repeated several times in the ensuing decades, with everything from violent and misogynist “gangster-rap” music to Internet-disseminated pornography and depictions of real-world violence forcing a review of where the lines between free-speech and hate-speech, responsible and irresponsible media should be drawn.

On a much more profound and consequential level, the use of media as means of fomenting extremism and violence is well documented – from the production of the critically-acclaimed (for its technical brilliance) though substantively abhorrent silent film Birth of a Nation (1915), which glamorizing the Ku Klux Klan and become the first Hollywood “blockbuster”, to the production of the propagandistic Nazi-era film Triumph of the Will (1935); to the genocide-instigating programs of Radio-Télévision Libre de Mille-Collines that laid the groundwork for the 1993 genocide in Rwanda and resulted – three years later - in the indictment of that station’s Director Ferdinand Nahimana on charges of genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, incitement to genocide, and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.1

In recent years, two developments have once again propelled the debate about media’s impact on society to the forefront of concern, and in fact expanded it from a domestic issue with which every country grapples to an international debate about media, its impact, and how to deal with it.

First, the advent of digital media technologies and the game-changing explosion of the Internet as a new platform for the dissemination and interactive engagement with media content has ensured that what may begin as a media-related issue of local concern can

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very quickly become a global phenomenon and what is happening at the global level can be brought down to the local level – into people’s living rooms so to speak – at a scale and with an immediacy never before possible. The digital revolution has also added to the already-saturated media environment in which today’s child lives, making questions about its impact all the more pressing.2

Second, the inexorable process of “globalization ”, of which the digital media explosion is both a driver and a consequence, has resulted in a world of growing complexity and interdependence – such that what happens in one location reverberates and yields consequences elsewhere. This is demonstrably true across a wide array of phenomena and events - be they environmental, financial, health-related or security-related in nature.

When what is now known as the Danish cartoon controversy erupted in 2005-2006 it was hard to imagine such a strange phenomenon happening just 20 years earlier – a cartoon printed in a relatively obscure local newspaper in a Scandinavian country leading to both Governmental and popular protests, including serious vandalism and even loss of life, thousands of miles away.

The polarizing impact of that controversy – which was fed not only by the actions of media editors but also by the ill-considered steps taken by activists and even political leaders of diverse backgrounds – has crystallized into an international debate that continues to this day regarding what the limits of freedom of expression should be and how to regulate them. This is a difficult enough debate to have when it takes place within national boundaries. When internationalized to encompass the concerns, sensitivities, and distinct historical experiences of diverse cultures around the world, it is truly daunting.

1 In the sentencing of Nahimana the presiding judge stated “Without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon, he caused the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians”. Nahimana was sentenced to life in prison – the first life-sentence imposed on a journalist for inciting murder through his reports.

2 In a survey report published in 2005, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reported that American children are exposed to just under 6.5 hours of media per day across all formats – music, TV, Internet, DVDs, etc. (Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-Olds, Roberts, Foehr, Rideout, and Brodie; March 2005).

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But quite apart from the question of what the legal limits of freedom of expression should be and how the media should be regulated, there is the question of what media industry leaders and media consumers voluntarily draw as the lines of decency in the media.

News media agencies often react to criticism by noting that they merely report the news – they do not make it – and so the impact or consequence of what gets broadcast should not be laid at their feet. For their part, entertainment media agencies often react to criticisms that they feed simplistic and negative stereotypes or feature too much sex and violence in their productions by noting that they merely cater to the interests of their audiences – they give people what they want.

And regardless of the position of producers and distributors regarding what they produce, they can – and often do – fall back on the argument that audiences can always change the station, surf to a different site on the web, purchase a different video game, or turn the media off completely.

One desired outcome of this publication is to help inform these on-going debates about the appropriate limits of freedom of expression in the media – among policy-makers, media industry leaders, and media consumers alike – by shedding some light on how media actually influences us.

However, in recent decades, interest in media’s impact has not only been fed by a fear of media’s potential negative impact, but also by the prospect that media can have a profoundly positive and constructive impact on how we understand and deal with a variety of global issues. Indeed, in the past forty years the field of media-for-social change has grown remarkably.

Pioneering efforts to use media (including dramas) to popularize practices that would enhance public health by organizations such as Population Services International (established in 1970) have in turn inspired conflict-sensitive news and entertainment programming produced on every continent and in virtually every media format by organizations like Search for Common Ground and Fondation Hirondelle. The lessons learned from the work of such organizations in some of the most divided and conflict-ridden societies in the world is instructive.3

3 For insight on the use of radio soap operas, documentaries, and sitcoms to humanize across ethnic divides and develop a national narrative to deal with genocide in Rwanda, see Paluck, E.L. (2009). “Reducing Intergroup Prejudice and Conflict Using the Media: A Field Experiment in Rwanda”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 574-587.

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The establishment in 2004 of Participant Productions (renamed Participant Media in 2008) with the motto “Media That Entertains and Compels Social Change” marked perhaps the most significant foray to-date of the media-for-social-change movement into the heart of commercial mass media. Participant’s success with the climate-change film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) has only expanded and accelerated interest in the use of media for social change as evidenced by the recent decision of the Gates Foundation to form a partnership with Viacom to integrate themes relevant to the Foundation’s priority public health and education causes into the programming of Viacom’s myriad television production companies and distribution outlets.

Deepening our understanding of exactly how media influences attitudes and behaviors – the main purpose of this publication - will hopefully inform, support, and further inspire the efforts of producers, distributors, policy-makers, and donors already engaged in producing and disseminating media for social change.

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Key Concepts for Group Affiliation and Inter-Group Relations: Social Identity and Self-EsteemThe psychological concepts of social identity and self-esteem are crucial to understanding the how media impacts upon intergroup relations. Social identity theory tells us that an individual’s self-esteem is influenced by group status, therefore, social identity informs our sense of self and self-esteem.4 Further, cross-cultural studies have shown that exposure to images of violence against one’s group causes individuals to feel a stronger group identity, to cling tighter to their cultural worldviews or ideologies, and to desire stronger retribution towards outgroups.5 The perceived slight of one’s group is therefore personally offensive and provokes a strong individual emotional response resulting in a need to enhance their social identity and to raise the status of their group by refuting the group that has caused the slight.6

This phenomenon played out in the 1992 race riots that followed the repeated airing of the beating of motorist Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers and the acquittal of four of those officers by the court that tried them. More recently social scientists have studied the galvanizing and potentially radicalizing impact of media depicting degrading and humiliating treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq which militant groups incorporated into recruitment videos to foment outrage and a desire for vengeance.

4 Steele, 1988; see also Cohen, Garcia, Apfel, & Master, 2006; Sherman & Cohen, 20065 Pyszczynski, T.; Solomon, S.; Greenberg, J. (2003). “In the wake of 9/11: The psychology of terror”. American Journal of Psychiatry 160 (5): 1019.6 See Michael Lewis, “Shame and Stigma,” Shame: Interpersonal Behavior, psychopathology, and culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), pp.126-140; and, “Cortisol responses to embarrassment and shame,” Child Development v.73 (4), Jul-Aug 2002, pp.1034-1045.

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In short, media images of the victimization of a member of one’s identity-group or community makes viewers more aware of their group’s pain, tends to strengthen one’s identification with that group and, in some cases, motivates an urge to take retaliatory action.7

In conducting research in Khan Yunis, Gaza in 2003 Nichole Argo (then of Harvard University, now of the New School for Social Researcher), interviewed a young Palestinian named Hisham, who spoke directly to the power of media: “The difference between the first intifada and the second is television. Before, I knew when we were attacked here, or in a nearby camp, but the reality of the attacks everywhere else was not so clear. Now, I cannot get away from Israel—the TV brings them into my living room…And you can’t turn the TV off. How could you live with yourself? At the same time, you can’t ignore the problem—what are you doing to protect your people? We live with an internal struggle. Whether you choose to fight or not, every day is this internal struggle.”

Of course, the primary issue to be addressed in the examples noted above is the existence of brutality and violence – not merely media’s coverage of these realities. It is not the purpose of this report to ignore this reality. However, the power of media to bring these realities into people’s homes, to amplify them and, in some cases, to sensationalize them – and the impact this has on media consumers - needs to be better understood. So too does the impact of dehumanizing media content which is not related to real events – entertainment media in the form of films, television dramas and “reality”-programs, video-games, and on-line user-generated and distributed content.

Moreover, the power of both news and entertainment media to further divide and polarize communities begs the question – does the reverse hold? Specifically, would the depiction of genuine acts of respect and recognition, directly related to one’s group-identity and self-esteem, help to defuse conflict and contribute to reconciling communities?

The research funded by the AOCMF contributes to our understanding of these question by testing self-affirmation theory, which posits that individuals and groups resist persuasion attempts and pragmatic negotiation compromises in part because to do otherwise would be costly to their sense of identity and self-integrity, while self-affirmation makes people relatively more open to information and ideas that would otherwise prove threatening to their ideological identity.8

7 B. Bender, “Study Cites Seeds of Terror in Iraq: War Radicalized Most,” Boston Globe, July 17, 2005; Daniel Benjamin, Testimony to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. Senate, August 2006; Mark Mazzetti, “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat,” New York Times, September 24, 2006.8 Sherman, D. K., & Cohen, G. L. (2006). The psychology of self-defense: Self-affirmation theory. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 38, pp.183-242). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

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AOCMF-Supported Research & Literature ReviewTo begin to explore whether, how, and under what conditions media depictions might effect a moderating influence on issues of self-identity and/or a reconciling influence on intergroup relations, the Alliance of Civilizations Media Fund provided research gifts in 2008 to support four sets of studies conducted by leading scientists at Harvard University, MIT and The New School for Social Research.

To further inform the presentation of this research and place it within the context of decades of previous research that has helped advance our understanding of media’s impact, the AOCMF sponsored an extensive literature review. A summary of that review is below but, in brief, three points stand out:

1)- Very little of the existing research on media impact addresses the specific effects on inter-group relations and the emotions, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that bear on these relations;

2)- Research conducted to-date does not satisfactorily address explanatory mechanisms, i.e. “how” media works on human cognition, in part due to the lack - until recently – of methods to measure these effects;9

3)- Media’s role in fostering or maintaining implicit bias10 as well as the emotional mechanisms through which media influences attitudes are gaining increased attention and becoming more understandable to researchers as critically important to understanding media’s impact on intergroup relations.

9 Hawkins, R. B. a. P., S. (1990). Divergent psychological processes in constructing social reality from mass media content. Cultivation analysis: New directions in media effects research. N. a. M. Signorielli, M. Newbury Park, CA, Sage: 33-50. See also, Shrum, L. J. (2009). Media Consumption and Perceptions of Social Reality. Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research. J. Bryant, and Mary Beth Oliver. New York, Routledge: 50-73.10 Implicit bias, also known as “unconscious bias” or “hidden bias” is a concept that may help explain why discrimination persists at rates far above what opinion polling and other research would indicate. In Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes, Self-Esteem, and Cognition (1995), Dr.’s Anthony Greenwald and M.R. Benaji argue that our social behavior is largely driven by learned stereotypes that come into play unconsciously when we interact with others. If true, this would mean that some of our social interaction is not under our conscious control and operates almost automatically according to learned stereotypes. The researchers later developed the Implicit Association Test (IAT) which can be self-administered on-line and is now widely-used to measure implicit bias.

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A HISTORY OF RELEVANT MEDIA IMPACT RESEARCHIn this section, we review the history of knowledge on media effects from the 1920s to now. Research progress is broken down into two distinct stages. The early stage begins with the arrival of radio and film and ends with the beginning of the 1990s. Research in this stage focuses mostly on media’s impact on public attitudes. The second stage, covering the past 10-20 years, is marked by the introduction of new research technologies, with a resulting focus on how media’s impact works. During this period, researchers focused on the specific mechanisms for how and when media influences people’s beliefs and behaviors. It identifies two previously unexplored media effects that influence intergroup relations: emotional judgments and implicit stereotypes.

Early Research: General Media EffectsIn the 1940 and 50s, following the development of “talkies” and the subsequent growth of the film industry, research on media impacts focused on how media might influence social attitudes and values. In this early period, most research investigated media’s ability to “change” attitudes and beliefs. But one of the main conclusions from research conducted at that time was that major attitudinal or belief change did not occur with exposure to radio, TV, or film. Indeed, one of media’s most powerful effects was not in changing attitudes, but in reinforcing already existing political beliefs and mainstream stereotypes.11

To be more specific, it was found that people only want to see things that they find to be agreeable and that they are motivated to avoid messages they find disagreeable, or that make them feel bad.12 In contrast to early claims that media could directly shape public attitudes and values, media scholars began to concede that media only had “limited effects.” Importantly, the major studies of that time were done during the relatively stable post-World War II years. Thus, it might have been more accurate to conclude that media holds limited effects during times of social and political stability. Media may or may not work the same way during times of crisis.

11 Lazarsfeld, P. F., and Patricia Kendall (1948). The People’s Choice, 2nd ed (New York: Columbia University Press).12 Zillmann, D., & Bryant, J. (1985). Selective Exposure Phenomana. In D. Zillmann & J. Bryant (Eds.), Selective Exposure to communication,p. 2 (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).

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The 1960s and 1970s saw the introduction of television into peoples lives. Again, the public response was to worry about the new technology’s social influence on the behavior of viewers—indeed, news headlines cited local criminals as saying, “I saw it done on TV.” Studies during this time hypothesized that viewers might mimic the behavior of characters they watch on television. The research theory of “limited effects” (evidence for which had largely come from polls of public attitudes and voting intentions) started to give way to a new paradigm based on more sophisticated scientific techniques and laboratory experimentation.

This new paradigm was a shift to the “social learning theory” of media impact, which essentially said that if individuals watch a person on TV who seems very attractive and who receives rewards for acting aggressively, the viewer will be more likely to imitate that character’s behavior. The first of these studies, designed by Albert Bandura in 1961, tested whether children exposed to aggressive “bobo doll” play on television would become more aggressive in their own play. Over many iterations of the study, Bandura demonstrated small but significant effects.13 That is, not everybody or even most mimic media aggression, but under very specific conditions, some do. Bandura’s findings emphasized that many other factors determining aggression at any given instant. With this caveat, scholars generally accept the basic principle of social learning theory.14

The Bobo doll experiments generated a great deal of interest in how media affects children, particularly in terms of aggression and, the field of “media violence research” expanded dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s. These studies correlated a steady diet of television violence with: an increase in aggressive behavior; changes in attitudes and values favoring the use of aggression to solve conflicts; a decrease in empathy for others along with a decreased willingness to help those in need15 and an increased willingness to tolerate violence;16 and, an increased fear that one may be the victim of violence, and decreased trust in the motivations of others—a phenomenon known as the “mean world syndrome.”17

13 Similar studies were done on media violence and its impact on aggression among adults: a 1969 field experiment designed for adults found that viewers exposed to a film depicting a moneybox theft were not likely to mimic the thief. Stanley Milgram, & Lance Shotland. Television and Anti-Social Behavior (Academic Press, 1974).14 Sparks, G.G. and Sparks, C.W. (2002). Effects of media violence. In J. Bryant & D. Zillmann (eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research. LEA”s communication series (2nd ed., pp.269-285). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.15 Zilmman, D., and James B. Weaver (2003). “Effects of Prolonged Exposure to Gratuitous Media Violence on Provoked and Unprovoked Hostile Behavior.”16 Bushman, B., Anderson, C. (2009). “Comfortably Numb: Desensitizing effects of violent media on helping others.” Psychological Science 20(3): 273-277.17 JP Murray, “Media Effects,” in Encyclopedia of Psychology v.5, Kazdin AE, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 153-155.

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The media violence research had a social and political influence, leading to a U.S. Congressional inquiries on violent media and aggression in the 1980s. Nevertheless, those studies share some important flaws.18 First, and most importantly, they do not show a causal connection between exposure to violent media and subsequent aggression. Instead, they were based on correlation. It may actually be that causation goes in the other direction, e.g. that children or adults who behave aggressively like to watch more violent programs because they want to see people who act the way they do.19 Second, many of the studies faced important methodological problems. This may be the reason that some of most controversial findings have not been successfully replicated.

Lastly, the studies did not reveal anything about how, why, or when media exposure would matter. For instance, in the Bobo Doll studies, subjects were more likely to behave aggressively when they had been physically present to witness another person behave aggressively with the Bobo Dolls than when they witnessed it via video. Why was this the case? It could be that the video depiction is a less potent communicator of a social norm, or that it “felt” further away, or any number of things. But answering that question is supremely important to understanding media effects. A second example highlighted the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Subjects were shown scenes of combat in a war setting and were either told that it was real footage or an enactment. Viewers who believed the combat was real were more likely to demonstrate aggressive post-film behavior than those who thought they were watching a reenactment.20

A final thought on the early media violence research is that it does not speak to the potentially complicating nature of group identities. It is difficult to say if and how findings from the media violence findings would have differed if the violent images people were looking at corresponded to group identity, i.e. war crimes, hate crimes, etc. perpetrated either by or against a group with which the viewer identifies directly (i.e. their own racial, ethnic, religious, or political group).

18 For a more thorough discussion, see this blog by communications scholar Henry Jenkins (April 2007): http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/04/a_few_thoughts_on_media_violen.html .19 Sparks, 2002.20 Berkowitz, L., & Alioto, J.T. (1973). The meaning of an observed event as a determinant of its aggressive consequences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28, 206-217.

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Recent Media Research: Mechanisms of Social Impact

Up until 1980, most research on media effects investigated attitude change—or, in the

case of media violence, behavior. But in recent decades, researchers have begun to

focus on mechanisms, or how media works.

The recent media research draws from rapid and revolutionary advances in the

scientific understanding of social cognition. With the emergence of brain imaging and

psychophysiology methodologies in the past two decades, as scientists have increasingly

been able to “get inside people’s heads,” what have they found?

One of the hallmarks of recent social cognition models is their emphasis on emotions as

drivers of rationality. Laboratory studies demonstrate that emotions can prompt and shape

beliefs as much as they are shaped by them.21 Indeed, recent years have demonstrated

that almost none of the human judgments we once believed to be principled or reasoned

out, i.e, moral judgments,22 ideology or worldview,23 or even rationality itself,24 are

uninformed by emotion. Therefore, emotion ought not to be understood as the antithesis

to healthy judgment but innate to it. And, equally important to this understanding, is the

recognition that much of our judgment-making occurs at an implicit level, i.e. without our

awareness.

The implicit process relies on two important and interrelated principles: First, the heuristic

principle, which asserts that when people construct judgments, they typically do not search

their memory for all the information available, but, instead, only retrieve whatever subset

of information that is sufficient to make that judgment.25 Second, the accessibility principle,

which says that the information that comes most readily to mind will likely be the basis of

that judgment, accurate or not. Therefore, judgments, including stereotypes, are based on

constructs that can be acquired easily, even thoughtlessly.

21 Nico Frijda, Antony Manstead, Sacha Bem, “The Influence of Emotions on Beliefs,” Emotions and Beliefs: How Feelings Influence Thoughts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 4.22 See Greene JD, et al. “An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment,” Science 293, 2105-2108 (2001). Also, Casebeer W., “Moral cognition and its neural constituents,” Nature Reviews: Neuroscience v.4, October 2003, 841-846.23 Empirical evidence showing that radical ideologies are not acquired through a rational vetting of argument is summarized and explained in Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania Press, 2004). For an explanation at the neurobiological level, see D’Aquili and L. Newberg, “The Neurobiology of Myth and Ritual,” Readings in Ritual Studies, R.I. Grimes, ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995): 132-145; and, Douglas Marshall, “Behavior, Belonging and Belief: A Theory of Ritual Practice,” Sociological Theory 20/3 (November 2002):360-380.24 Rose McDermott, “The Feeling of Rationality: The Meaning of Neuroscientific Advances for Political Science,” Perspectives on Politics 2004, 2, pp.691-706.25 Wyer, R. S. (2004). Social Comprehension and Judgment: The role of situational models, narratives, and implicit theories. Mahwah, NJ, Earlbaum.

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It is important to note here that a number of factors influence the ease with which the information upon which the judgment or stereotype is constructed: the frequency and

recency of construct activation,26 the vividness of a construct,27 and its relations with other

accessible constructs.28

How does all of this relate to media impacts? One way that media likely influences viewer judgments is by providing viewers with accessible constructs, or “primes.” Priming is any means—even subliminal—of activating in our mind a script or story for a given situation. It is a process where one thing that you think about reminds you of other things in your mind that you have associated with that thing. According to Leonard Berkowitz and Eunkyung Jo, two priming experts, when “people witness, read or hear of an event via the mass media, ideas having similar meaning are activated in them for a short time afterwards, and…these thoughts in turn can activate other semantically related ideas and action-tendencies”29. When particular concepts are portrayed in a relatively consistent and formulaic way—as they are in television programs and films—they provide “scripts” or “situational models” for the viewer.30 For instance, viewers may begin to associate “anger” with “crime” or “violence”.31

These are the ideas behind cultivation theory, which states that there is a positive relation between the frequency of viewing television and social perceptions that are congruent with the world as it is portrayed in media. That is, one way media may influence consumers is by causing them to believe the world is as it appears on media—so that those media scripts and stereotypes are not only ‘real,’ but ‘appropriate’ as ways of interpreting and acting in life. There is some evidence to support cultivation,32 but it is not black and white. Viewers are not “empty slates” ready to accept whatever media tells them. Instead, direct real-life experience can alter media effects. For instance, Busselle and Schrum had participants recall examples of various constructs (trials, murder, highway accident) and found that media examples were more frequently recalled for constructs that are often portrayed in media but infrequently experienced, whereas personal experiences were more frequently retrieved for events occurring often in real life, regardless of their frequency in the media.33

26 Higgins, E. T. (1996). Knowledge activation: Accessibility, applicability and salience. In E. T. Higgins & A. E.Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 133-168). New York: Guilford.27 Higgins, E. T., & King, G. ( 1981 ). Accessibility of social constructs: Information processing consequences of individual and contextual variability. In N. Cantor & J. Kihlstrom (Eds.), Personality, cognition and social interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.28 Collins and Loftus (1975). A spreading activation theory of semantic memory. Psychological Review, 82, 407-428.29 Jo, E., & Berkowitz, L. (1994). A priming effect analysis of media influences: An update. In J. Bryant & D. Zillmann (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in Theory and Research, p.45.30 Wyer, R. S. (2004). Social Comprehension and Judgment: The role of situational models, narratives, and implicit theories. Mahwah, NJ, Earlbaum.31 Shrum, L. J. (2009). Media Consumption and Perceptions of Social Reality. Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research. J. Bryant, and Mary Beth Oliver. New York, Routledge: 50-73.32 Michael Morgan and James Shanahan. Two Decades of Cultivation Research: An Appraisal and a Meta-Analysis. In B. Burleson (ed.), Communication Yearbook 20. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996, 1-45.33 R. Busselle and L. Schrum (2003). Media Exposure and Exemplar Accessibility. Media Psychology v.5, n.3 (August), pp.255-282.

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Thus, bringing it back to what we’ve learned from social cognition models, it is the subjective ease of recall and not the frequency of media exposure that influences judgments.34 Our experiences, via media and via life, inform our representations of the world. The most vivid, recent, and frequent inputs we receive regarding a situation that we may one day encounter determine how we understand and judge that situation when it eventually presents itself. This raises questions for the role media plays in – for instance – informing how we understand and judge situations, cultures, and the actions of individuals or groups with whom we have little direct contact or ‘real-world’ experience.

34 Schwartz et al. (1991). Ease of Retrieval as Information: Another Look at the Availability Heuristic. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, v.61, n. 2, pp.195-202.

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In sum, media research has been transformed by the advances in the study of social cognition. First, it has begun to prioritize how media influences human cognition, rather than simply trying to show that it has an effect. Second, it has come to recognize that changes in cognition can happen implicitly, and in a much more complicated way than previously expected. Having established how the social cognition models inform recent media research, let us now discuss what it means for five media effects that hold relevance for intergroup relations: stereotypes, worldview, hostility/aggression, attitude change, and empathy. The way we discuss them here, the first three concepts will deal largely with the exacerbation of intergroup tensions, or “polarization”, while the latter two represent efforts at ameliorating intergroup tensions – “building up” or reconciling intergroup relations.

I. Media & Polarization: Stereotypes, Worldview, Hostility/Aggression

■ Stereotypes

Susan Fiske and Shelly Taylor define stereotypes as: “a particular kind of role schema that organizes people’s expectations about other people who fall into certain social categories”35. From an evolutionary perspective, the ability to make a quick judgment about people is crucial to the way we function. And in social life, stereotyping only becomes a problem when those judgments are wrong. Thus, whether and how media propagates inaccurate intergroup stereotypes is important. Two questions need to be asked: First, does the media propagate inaccurate stereotypes? Second, how does the media influence the stereotypes that we hold?

Much more research addresses the first question than the second.36 In the U.S., for instance, we know that while African Americans actually comprised the lowest percentage of arrests in real crime statistics in L.A., they comprised the highest percentage of perpetrators represented on TV news there.37 In contrast, compared to their actual arrest rates (28%), Whites comprised only 21% of the perpetrators shown on TV news. Similarly, in a content analysis of hundreds of Hollywood films depicting Arabs and Muslims since the 1980s, Jack G. Shaheen found that the vast majority of depictions were of Muslims as either terrorists, religious fanatics, or oil sheikhs.38 The answer to the first question (does media inaccurately portray stereotypes) is clearly “yes”, at least sometimes. But does an inaccurate depiction matter? And if so, how does it influence media consumers?

35 Susan Fiske and Shelly Taylor. (1991). Social Cognition, 2nd Edition (New York: McGraw Hill).36 Glenn Sparks (2002). Media Effects Research: A Basic Overview.37 Travis Dixon and Daniel Linz (2000). Race and the Misrepresentation of Victimization on Local Television News. Communication Research, v.27, n.5, pp.547-573.38 Shaheen, Jack G. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Olive Branch Press, 2001.

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Recall from the social cognition section that media is more likely to affect our beliefs about reality when we do not have first-hand experiences to rely on. Thus, in the case of ethnic or racial stereotypes at least, we would more easily accept media primes about such groups if we did not have first-hand experience to complicate them. In one famous priming study, for instance, participants were required to form judgments about another person based on his or her ambiguous behaviors. As they were thinking, they were primed in various ways by the researchers. Indeed, in this study, lacking any personal information about the target person, participants chose concepts that had been primed to interpret another person’s ambiguous behaviors.39

In essence then, the circulation of inaccurate stereotypes, especially with regard to groups with whom viewers have little direct experience, can serve to reinforce inaccurate beliefs and justify unconstructive behavior in real world interactions with those groups.

One recent study showed the potential behavioral outcomes to devastating effect. Two experiments involving White participants tested the influence of media-based African American stereotypes on subsequent responses to African American and White persons-in-need.40 The first experiment showed that priming the “Black criminal” stereotype through exposure to photographs of African Americans looting after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Louisiana shoreline in 2005 produced greater application of the criminal stereotype and support for aggressive or even harmful treatment toward African American evacuees-in-need (i.e., police firing gun shots directly over evacuees> heads) relative to control conditions. The second experiment by these researchers showed that priming the “promiscuous Black female” stereotype through exposure to sexual rap music elicited greater application of the promiscuity stereotype and reduced empathy for an African American pregnant woman-in-need relative to control conditions. From the above we can deduce that stereotypes caused the decrease in empathy because those subjects with more moderate stereotype attributions continued to empathize more.

39 TK Srull and RS Wyer. (1979). The Role of Category Accessibility in the Interpretation of Information about Persons. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.40 J Johnson, B Bushman, J Dovidio. (2008). Support for harmful treatment and reduction of empathy toward blacks:“Remnants” of stereotype activation involving Hurricane Katrina and “Lil’ Kim”. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, v.44, n.6.

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■ Worldview

As discussed earlier, cultivation theory states that media influences us in one way by shaping our subjective understanding of reality, i.e. our beliefs about the world—what it is, how it works, etc. According to the theory, even though the creators of media messages may not intend to change attitudes or beliefs, over time the media consumer tends to believe that the real world resembles the world presented in media. For instance, the heavy TV viewer tends to believe that the world is a more violent place than it is. In one study by Bryant, Carveth and Brown participants were exposed to either heavy or light viewing of films depicting crime over a six week period.41 The researchers found that those in heavy exposure conditions came to believe that they stood a greater likelihood of being a victim of violence and indicated a greater fear of victimization than did those in light exposure conditions. This finding has been replicated time and again, and appears to have stronger effects when a real-life environment has resonance with the environment depicted in media.42

Above, we characterize media’s impact on worldview largely as an impact on beliefs. But another closely related concept also falls within the category of worldview: social norms. Norms are socially shared definitions of the way people do behave or should behave.43 They are important to a discussion of media effects for two reasons: first, because as much as media might influence our beliefs about the likelihood of crime, they also influence our understanding of norms, that is, how others will respond to a crime. In terms of behaviors, we are likely to act in ways that take into account what others will do. Second, in experimental settings, our assumptions about social norms predict our behavior more than our own stated beliefs or values do. The implications for media campaigns intended to influence behavior are clear: if you want to change people’s behavior, attempting to address their attitudes or beliefs directly may not be as effective as convincing them that other people’s attitudes and behaviors have changed.

This mechanism was most recently demonstrated in an experiment which investigated the impact of a reconciliation-based radio soap opera in Rwanda. Perhaps counterintuitively, psychologist Betsy Paluck did not find that the soap opera changed listeners’ personal beliefs regarding inter-ethnic marriage, dissent, trust between Hutus and Tutsis, empathy cooperation or trauma healing. Instead, she found that listeners’ perceptions of social norms (e.g. what they thought other people thought) changed, and that this change initiated new and positive intergroup behaviors.

41 J Bryant, R Carveth, D Brown. (1981). Television viewing and anxiety: An experimental investigation. Journal of Communication.42 G Gerbner, L Gross, M Morgan (1994). Growing up with television: the cultivation perspective. In Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research.43 D. T. Miller, Monin, & Prentice (2000). Attitudes, behavior, and social context: The role of norms and group membership.44 Group discussion of the radio shows played a role, too, implying that social context is likely an important ingredient influencing media’s impact on social norms. See Paluck, 2009.

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■ Violent Media and Aggression

Social cognition findings have also been invoked to explain the process by which violent media affects aggression. The idea is that media violence primes thoughts related to hostility,45 and for a short period of time following exposure to media violence, such thoughts might affect the way we see other people and interpret their actions (worldview). Secondly, media violence might prime the belief that aggressive behavior is accepted by society and therefore justified or warranted (norms). For instance, Bushman et al. looked at whether violent video games produce a hostile expectation bias, or in other words, the tendency to expect others to react to potential conflicts with aggression. After playing either a violent or non-violent video game, participants read ambiguous story introductions about potential interpersonal conflicts. They were asked what the main character would do, say, think, and feel as the story continues. People who played a violent video game described the main character as behaving more aggressively, thinking more aggressive thoughts, and feeling angrier than did people who played a nonviolent video game.46 Similar studies have shown that violent constructs become more accessible after viewing violent films.47

45 Berkowitz and Jo, 1994.46 B Bushman and C Anderson. (2002). Violent Video Games and Hostile Expectations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, v.28, n.12, pp.1679-1686.47 B Bushman. (1998). Priming effects of media violence on the accessibility of aggressive constructs in memory. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, v.24, n.5, pp.537-545.

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The value of social cognition research for media studies is that it has helped us to see how media impacts stereotypes, worldview and hostility/violence according to a similar mechanism—an implicit one, such as priming. What is fascinating is that stereotypes, sometimes ones of which we are not even aware, can be activated and can lead to behavior even without our recognition or conscious intention. Our worldviews and social perceptions may change, inadvertently, in response to what images we walk by or choose to view without our awareness.

II. Media and Reconciliation: Attitudes and Empathy

Given the implicit and emotional pathways rendering media’s influence on stereotypes, worldview and hostility/violence, perhaps it will not come as a surprise that cutting edge research on attitude change and empathy show these outcomes to operate in similar ways.

■ Attitudes

As discussed above, previous media research showed that the intent to actively change political or social attitudes did not work in early media campaigns. Instead, ironically, examples abounded of people being persuaded by media messages that weren’t even designed to change attitudes or behavior.

This is especially true with entertainment media. One such example of media influence occurred when the main character applied for a library card on the popular 1970s American sitcom Happy Days. In the weeks following that episode, national libraries reported a 500% increase in library card applications (Public Broadcasting System, 1984). There was no persuasive ploy in the episode; instead, the explanation best resembles social learning theory, because viewers who admired the character were simply motivated to copy his behavior. Another example involves the infamous 1983 movie broadcast by ABC-TV, The Day After, depicting the aftermath of a nuclear war in the U.S. Though the movie was designed for entertainment purposes, researchers discovered that exposure to the movie was sufficient to change attitudes about the seriousness of nuclear war. People who watched the movie were likely to get involved in actions to help prevent war.48 The fervent emotional reactions inspired by the movie caused viewers to reflect on whether the same possibilities existed in the real world.

48 JW Shofield and MA Pavelchak. (1989). Fallout from ‘The Day After’: the Impact of a TV Film on Attitudes Related to Nuclear War. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, v.19, n.5, pp.433-448.

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What do we make of these examples? The irony of entertainment media’s effect on attitudes and beliefs is that when it persuades, it is usually not trying. That is, when viewers go to a movie and sit back to relax, they are not preparing to process a persuasive message. Psychologists studying persuasion have discovered that most people approach a persuasive situation with their defenses up. They are prepared for a highly rational and cognitive deliberation, they scrutinize a message carefully and think up counterarguments or stories. In this situation, persuasion rarely occurs. But persuasion happens more easily via a peripheral route.49 In this case, certain cues from a message lead people to accept the proposition with little cognitive thought or scrutiny. This is one reason why entertainment media can have enormous - if mostly unintended - effects.

Indeed, even something as subtle as labeling a shocking story as “real” might cause viewers to wonder about why they are being told it is fact. In one study on whether media depictions of paranormal events might change viewers beliefs, viewers who viewed the images without being told whether they were real or fictional were influenced more than viewers in either the “fictional” or “real” conditions.50

■ Empathy

One way that scientists anticipate positive media impacts is through empathy, i.e. the viewer’s character-driven emotional responses to media content.51 The idea here is that we feel for a character, and thereby begin to incorporate his or her perspective into how we see the world. That base of knowledge or perspective may thereafter be activated by real life situations that somehow invoke the character. But does this logic hold if the character we view is a member of an often-stereotyped group or one against whom we hold a negative view?

Consider one study where groups were polarized not by ethnicity but by stigma. Subjects listened to a cassette taping of a convicted murderer as he talked about how he grew up, what led him to his crime, etc. Half of the subjects were asked to “empathize and really try to feel what the character is saying,” while the other half were not. At the end of the study, neither the subjects who empathized nor those who did not had changed their opinions on the death penalty. But two weeks later, subjects who had empathized with the cassette character had changed their attitudes: they were more likely to be against the death penalty.52

49 R Petty and J Cacciopo. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion.50 See Sparks, 1994. 51 Katja Mellman discusses the possible role of mirror neurons in this process in, “E-Motion: Being Moved by Fiction and Media? Notes on Fictional Worlds, Virtual Contacts and the Reality of Emotions,” PsyArt: An Online Journal (2002). [www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2002_mellmann01.shtml].“ See also, Dolf Zillman, Media Entertainment: The Psychology of its Appeal (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000), p.64.52 Batson et al, “Empathy and Attitudes: Can Feeling for a Member of a Stigmatized Group Improve Feelings Toward the Group?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1997, Vol. 72, No. 1, 105-118

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These results tell us something very important about how and when empathy influences attitudes: first, emotional processes can be sublimated by cognitive effort. Participants in the experiment above seemed to resist letting their empathy-induced feelings for the murderer influence their attitudes toward convicted murderers immediately, when they were aware of the overt influence of the media stimulus. But, later, with their guard down, the effect showed in their attitudinal shift.

As in the case of stereotypes, worldviews and hostility/aggression, one of the strongest routes by which media appears to influence attitude change or empathy is implicit. All together, this review suggests important considerations for professionals involved in the business of media and social change. First, it may be that changing beliefs and values should not be primary goals in media-making; instead, since perceived norms have been shown to more strongly predict behavior, producers may wish to create socially constructive media which alters messages about social norms. Second, media producers should be aware that viewers are wary of attempts to persuade them. As long as they perceive an effort to emotionally influence them, they will likely generate cognitive blocks. These blocks may or may not prevent true attitude change especially over time. But this leads to a third consideration, which is that media makers should augment the conventional survey measures used to test the impact of their media campaigns with more implicit measures aimed at revealing belief and attitude changes of which respondents themselves may not even be aware.

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Alliance of Civilizations Media Fund (AOCMF)-Supported Laboratory CollaborationsWhile the studies discussed above are noteworthy for their efforts to reveal how media influence works, the AOCMF wanted to test these mechanisms in further in depth. Specifically, it was interested in how violent or stereotypically negative media impacts group relations by actually connecting a powerful intergroup media experience to a brain scan or to an interaction with an outgroup member. Similarly, it wanted to investigate how socially-responsible media (where formerly stereotyped groups and intergroup relations are represented in a more-balanced and respectful manner) may do the same. It therefore asked leading researchers from the fields of brain and cognitive sciences, psychophysiology, and social psychology (at Harvard, MIT and the New School for Social Research) to devise and conduct independent, original studies to this end. “Group relations” in these studies are measured by the beliefs, emotions, expectations, attitudes, and behaviors an individual holds towards an outgroup. Research has been conducted since March of 2008, and will continue through 2010. Some initial findings are presented below.

Before continuing, it is important to note why the AOCMF funded laboratories in three different disciplines. Real-time group interactions involve a complex emotional and cognitive process that cannot accurately be captured solely via self-report methods such as questionnaires or surveys. Intergroup beliefs, emotions, attitudes and prejudices can change so quickly and implicitly that people often won’t know when, how or why they changed, and some would be unable to say what their beliefs or attitudes actually are.

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For this reason, two of the AOCMF-funded laboratories employed psycho-physiological methods. The goal was to identify the physical correlates of emotion, cognition and behavior. Brain scans (fMRI), for instance, allow researchers to locate those areas of the brain that are activated by media and intergroup processes, thus giving a sense of the role that emotion and cognition networks in the brain play in belief- and attitude-formation. Brain imaging research has included general brain mapping of adolescents viewing violent fictional images;53 the role of emotion in moral judgments and decision-making;54

and the role of emotion in making blame attributions.55 Likewise, heart rate variability, skin conductance, and hormone readings have been used in media and intergroup research to index attention, emotional arousal, contagion and cognitive effort.56

53 Murray JP (2000), “Media Effects,” in Encyclopedia of Psychology v.5, Kazdin AE, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 153-155).54 Greene et al, 2001; McDermott, 2004.55 Unpublished research, personal correspondence with Rebecca Saxe, 9/14/06.56 See M. Suckfull (2000), “Film analysis and psychophysiology: Effects of moments of impact and protagonists,” Media Psychology, 2, 269-301.

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FindingsIn asking how media content can affect viewers’ intergroup emotions, beliefs, and behaviors, the AOCMF-funded labs are exploring the following:

1. Whether imagining or observing a slight or violence against a group member via media may cause an equally strong (or even stronger) emotional reaction and desire for retaliation than experiencing a slight or harm one>s self (Dr. Jeremy Ginges, Social Psychology, The New School for Social Research).

2. How media images of violence and humiliation against one’s group (fictional or non-fictional) affect one’s emotions, beliefs, and behaviors. (Dr. Wendy Mendes, Harvard, Psychophysiology Lab)

3. If and how media images of positive intergroup contact - i.e. interactions reflecting group-based recognition and respect – help to defuse intergroup biases. (Dr. Rebecca Saxe, MIT, Brain and Cognitive Science).

We discuss some of the initial findings below.

Finding #1: The brain processes group-related reasoning emotionally.

The goal of the Saxe Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at MIT is to identify the nature of intergroup bias within the brain, and then test how media interventions actually impacted that neural bias. To that end, it has already delivered powerfully. Their 2009 study provided the first ever brain imaging findings to demonstrate that reasoning differs for in-group and out-group partisan arguments. By averaging and comparing activation in specific brain regions during emotional and non-emotional statements, they revealed greater activation in one of the socio-emotional centers, the precuneus, for group-related emotional statements (Figure 1 below). Moreover, activation in the precuneus correlated with both implicit and explicit measures of negativity towards the outgroup (in Figure 2, we show correlations with self-reported feelings of “warmth” towards the other group).

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Figure 1Group analysis of all participants for control (non-partisan statements) contrast.

Figure 2Precuneus activity (Arab-Israeli) compared to warmth (Arab-Israeli).

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This finding accords with larger trends linking rationality and emotion in social cognition literature. Today, the important research questions have less to do with whether rationality is emotional, and more to do with the conditions under which human judgment and reasoning processes diverge from “rational” models. The fact that we reason differently about group-related issues will not surprise most of us, yet it holds profound implications for both media and conflict management. Moreover, the Saxe study was essential on a research level, because locating this bias within the brain was essential in order to test whether and how positive media interventions change bias. The Saxe Lab is currently testing whether documentary footage that humanizes an outgroup member can disable this group reasoning bias and also whether and how facilitated web-based video dialogue between members of divided groups may lead to improved intergroup attitudes and relations. Findings are anticipated in early 2010.

Finding #2: Vicarious emotions matter.

Another of the AOCMF-supported experiments began looking at the processing of intergroup relations through the idea of vicarious emotion. Drawing from social identity theory, the idea is that reading about or seeing images of a slight or harm to one’s friend, family or group member (despite the fact that it has not happened to one’s self) may be powerful enough to cause change (in beliefs, emotions, or behaviors) in the viewer.

The Ginges Lab collaborated with graduate students at Harvard to develop survey vignettes and test them on 240 subjects in the Boston metropolitan area. Preliminary results were interesting: First, subjects were more likely to report a desire to retaliate at the perpetrator when their friend was the injured party than when they themselves were slighted or harmed. This finding was strongest for men, and strongest for subjects under age 30. Second, females were more likely to report that the perpetrator deserved to have retribution meted upon him when a group member was the injured party than when they themselves were.

These findings suggest two things about the vicarious nature of group prejudice or violence. First, we may feel the pain of friends and group members as much as we feel it personally; and second, it may be that we feel more responsibility to do something about it when we see injustice happen to those with whom we identify or have a bond. These ideas find support in the literature on intergroup emotions and “altruistic punishment”. For instance, Mackie et al. showed that when social identity is made salient, outgroup actions which have not materially affected an individual still elicit specific emotions and action-tendencies toward the outgroup.57 Moreover, evidence supporting terror management theory shows that when people view or read about violence against their ingroup, they shift towards a stronger social identity and are more willing to support retaliation.58 While the exact mechanism for the shift to a strong social identity or the desire to ‘punish’ is not known, several scholars posit that it has to do with self-esteem.

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In other words, we would shift towards a stronger social identity—upon exposure to slights or reminders of mortality—because the social group is a place of meaning, of safety, and a reminder of our self-worth.59 And we might desire to strike back against the group that has slighted or harmed our group as an attempt to re-empower our sense of self- and group-efficacy or -esteem even when we stand to gain nothing from taking punitive action or may even suffer losses or pain from it.60

Finding #3: Media shapes our subjective reality implicitly, at the level of stereotypes, and in terms of beliefs about the world.

Psychology researchers sometimes employ an exercise called the “weapons task” to gauge individuals’ implicit stereotypes.61 Originally developed to examine associations between African-American (versus White) faces and gun violence, the Mendes Lab at Harvard University adapted the task to examine associations between Arab (versus White) faces and gun violence. The weapons task gauges whether participants are faster and more accurate at identifying a gun after seeing an Arab or White face. The speed of identification is a measure of the strength of unconscious association (e.g. the faster the response, the stronger the association between face ethnicity and gun). Many social psychologists think that having a stronger association between one type of face and guns (as compared to another type of face and guns) is a type of bias.

The Mendes Lab at Harvard University decided to test whether the simple act of reading about and discussing a hate crime (perpetrated by Whites against Arabs in one condition, and by Arabs against Whites in another) would influence participants’ implicit biases. Preliminary results show that, holding constant the amount of intergroup contact subjects have had, subjects had—at least temporarily— a stronger association between weapons and whichever race had perpetrated the hate crime in the story they read, even if it was their own.62

57 Mackie, D. M., Devos, T., & Smith, E. R. (2000). Intergroup emotions: Explaining offensive action tendencies in an intergroup context. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 602-616.58 Pyszczynski, T.; Solomon, S.; Greenberg, J. (2003). “In the wake of 9/11: The psychology of terror”. American Journal of Psychiatry 160 (5): 101959 Ibid.60 Nico Frijda. The Lex Talionis: On Vengeance. In S.M. Goozen,. N.E. van de Poll and J. A. Sergeant (eds.), Emotions: Essays on Emotion Theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum.61 Keith Payne. (2001). Prejudice and Perception: The Role of Automatic and Controlled Processes in Misperceiving a Weapon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 81(2), Aug 2001, 181-192.62 Victim ethnicity also had an effect on associations between faces and guns. Overall, participants were much faster to identify weapons when they had read about an Arab victim. There is no immediate explanation for this finding, and further analysis regarding a victim-ethnicity interaction is underway.

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There are two important take-aways here. First, media can have an immediate affect on our construal of social reality even if it defies existing stereotypes. In this case, it seems that Whites held stronger white-gun associations after reading the hate crime story that featured white perpetrators. Second, the preliminary findings suggested a stronger Arab-gun association for white participants when the victim of the hate crime was also white. Thus, if recent media exposure affects unconscious associations of ethnic groups with violence—it may do so to greater extent when the crime is psychologically “near” to one’s group. If these findings were to bear out in further analysis, they would congeal with another study taking place at the same time in the Netherlands. There, researchers found that terrorism news increased explicit prejudice toward outgroup members in both Muslim and Non-Muslim participants.63 Because the right-wing politician Van Gogh was assassinated in the Netherlands during the study’s run, non-Arab study participants appeared to feel that terrorism against their group was psychologically “close.”

Finding #4: Social Context Matters. We experience different emotional reactions and emotional intensities based on who we experience media with.

The Mendes Lab study referenced above produced another preliminary finding of relevance to this report. In the study, white participants read about a hate crime after having met an “interaction partner” who was either Arab or White (the interaction partners were confederates, trained by the laboratory to enact the same behaviors with all participants). In one condition, the hate crime the participant read about was perpetrated by three White men against an Arab man; in the other condition, the hate crime was perpetrated by three Arab men against a White man. After participants finished reading about the hate crime, they discussed it with their “partner.” Self-reported emotions were collected just after reading about the hate crime, and then again after the partner interaction.

Preliminary analysis suggests two important points of interest. The first is that prior to the discussion about the hate crime, reading the hate crime generated the most negative emotions for white participants who were about to interact with an Arab partner. That is, whether the hate crime perpetrators were Arab or White, White subjects felt more negative emotions at the prospect of discussing with an Arab partner than with a White one. White subjects appear to have experienced the most negative emotions when they were about to discuss the hate crime with an Arab partner, and the perpetrator in the media scenario had been White.

63 Das, E., Bushman, B., Bezemer M., Kerkhof P., Vermeulen I. (2009). “How terrorism news reports increase prejudice against outgroups: A terror management account.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45: 453-459.

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The second point of interest deals with self-reported emotions after the discussion. After the interaction, those White participants who were in a White-Partner/White-Victim pair and those White participants who were in an Arab-Partner/Arab-Victim pair reported more negative emotion than White participants in a White-Partner/Arab-Victim or Arab-Partner/White-Victim pair. Interestingly, the negative emotions reported by participants in the two conditions differed. White participants who discussed an Arab victim with an Arab partner tended to report sadness, guilt and shame. White participants who discussed a white victim with a white partner tended to report anger.

In sum, it seems that when the interaction partner was of the same racial group as the victim in the hate crime, participants felt the emotion appropriate to their group’s relationship to the victim—either anger, sadness or guilt/shame. But when their partner’s presence was not relevant to victimhood, subjects simply didn’t “go there” emotionally.

This study may be one illustration of how social context can influence media’s impact. These preliminary findings concord with other experimental work showing that group discussion of a radio show played a role in the program’s ability to change perceptions of intergroup norms.64

To further test the impact of dialogue about and processing of media content, Soliya (formerly the AOCMF) has formed an on-going research partnership with the Saxe Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at MIT whereby the Lab will test the impact of Soliya’s programs, which use web-based media and dialogue to foster greater cross-cultural understanding.

64 See Paluck, 2009.

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ConclusionDecades of research on media effects tell us that media influences worldviews, social perception, and behavior in complex ways. Media’s impact on intergroup relations is similarly complex. This report has highlighted several important findings.

First, it highlights the central importance of personal self-esteem. Because social identity is a strong factor influencing one’s individual esteem, stigmatizing depictions of our social groups effect our self-esteem and motivations as individuals. In response to media’s portrayal of harm or perceived slights against identity-groups to which we belong, we are likely to cling even more tightly to our social identities and defend them in the small or large ways available to us. Under certain conditions, this can lead to increased tension or even violence between groups.

In terms of media mechanisms, we have learned from cultivation theory and priming studies that media depictions of other social groups (be they factual or fictional) inform our beliefs about social reality and intergroup norms, i.e. how the “other” thinks and feels and how we should interact, especially in the absence of substantial real-world experience or interaction with those depicted groups.

We have learned that media’s ability to change attitudes and stereotypes is often indirect—media consumers are vigilant against explicit attempts to persuade them. Instead, they are more likely to be influenced implicitly, via emotions and via media that influences their views of social norms.

This report dedicated substantial attention to past research on media violence, particularly in terms of the priming and desensitizing effects of repeated media messaging. New research integrating media violence and intergroup perspectives demonstrates that such effects extend to intergroup attitudes and behavior. For instance, when negative stereotypes of African-American were primed, test subjects gave less support to causes such as help for African-American victims of Hurricane Katrina. When Dutch participants were exposed to more news stories about acts of extremism and terrorism committed by Arab perpetrators, and when they felt it resonated with their political realities at home, they exhibited greater stereotypes against Arabs.

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Although still in progress, the new research covered toward the end of this report has already furthered our understanding of media and intergroup relations in some important ways. First, using state of the art brain imaging technology, the Saxe Lab at MIT has shown that individuals process group-related information in emotion-centers of the brain. That is, group-related reasoning and perception may well be implicit, emotional, and untouchable via traditional cognitive or rational approaches. If true, we would expect groups to respond very differently to the same media stimuli. We would also expect that cognitive, fact-based efforts to influence intergroup attitudes would be less successful than less explicit approaches that influence emotions, including virtual character experiences of outgroup members of the kind that new-media technologies make possible at a previously impossible scale and reduced cost.

Another finding highlights the powerful implicit impact that media has on individuals. The Mendes Lab showed that participants were more likely to hold an implicit bias against whichever racial group they had just read about as perpetrating a hate crime—even if it was their own.

Lastly, the social context within which one experiences media appears central to how it will affect them. In the Mendes lab, White subjects did not really empathize with – or “feel” - the pain of a hate crime victim unless they interacted with a dialogue partner who was the same race as the victim (be it Arab or White). If the partner was White, they were more likely to feel anger; and if the partner was Arab, they were more likely to feel anxiety, guilt or shame. While the Mendes lab dealt mostly with self-reported emotions, other studies are finding that social context also plays a role in the way media impacts perceived social norms. That is, radio or television programs about positive intergroup relations appear to have a stronger effect when listeners or viewers perceive that other community members and society at-large accept the behavior and values being portrayed.

Implications for Media Industry Leaders, Media-for-Social-Change Advocates, and Media Literacy Educators, and Donors and Policy-Makers in these Fields

1. How stereotyping works. Persistent media depictions of identity groups or situations in a particular way – especially groups or situations with which media consumers have little direct experience – establish “scripts” in the minds of media consumers (i.e. an association of people from a certain ethnic, religious, or racial group with aggressive or violent behavior for instance). When they then encounter these situations or members of these groups in real-life, they may be primed to understand and judge them (and to act accordingly) based on these scripts. The recency and frequency with which such depictions are consumed increases the ease with which they are then recalled by individuals to inform and guide their understanding of the real world. This happens largely on a subconscious and emotional level – so much so that studies of bias that rely solely on self-reporting of attitudes will often underestimate the degree to which bias actually exists and is acted upon.

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2. The centrality of emotion. More broadly speaking, emotion plays a central role in forming our judgments, worldview, & values. Efforts to persuade through cognitive reasoning and the presentation of counterfactuals tend to be less effective than media interventions that “speak to” or elicit an emotional reaction.

3. Context and interaction matters. Who we consume media with and with whom we interact following our exposure to media has a determinative effect on the degree to which we become emotionally invested in it. In media depictions of violence between two groups, media consumers become most emotional when the media exposure was followed by dialogue with a representative of the victimized group. Given that new media technologies expand the possibilities for media exposure followed by interaction with affected communities, this appears to be an exciting new frontier for the field of media-for-social-change. 4. We reason about group-related issues emotionally. We experience the emotions of groups with whom we identify vicariously – i.e. when we witness, through the media, friends or fellow-members of groups with whom we identify being slighted, harmed or victimized, we experience and process their pain in a similar fashion to how we would experience it if it were happening to us directly. In some, exposure to such experiences through the media fosters a greater urge for retaliation than they would feel even if it were happening to them directly. The experience of viewing the harming of someone with whom we identify can be so intense as to lead us to take “altruistic” punitive action – i.e. actions that harm the perceived aggressor but are also costly or harmful to us personally. Some researchers believe that such action can best be explained as being motivated by a desire to regain self-esteem on behalf of one’s group.

5. The power of social norms. Our assumptions about social norms predict our behavior more than our own stated beliefs or values do. In other words, when it comes to our behavior, we are likely to act in ways that take into account what we believe others will do. Media campaigns that attempt to influence behavior (i.e. anti-smoking campaigns, efforts to reduce inter-communal violence, etc.) by directly addressing the attitudes or beliefs of a given individual may therefore not be as effective as those that convince that individual that other people’s attitudes and behaviors have changed. Related to the point regarding stereotyping and priming, persistent media depictions of violence might prime the belief that aggressive behavior is accepted by society and therefore justified or warranted.

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6. The wary viewer. Viewers are wary of attempts to persuade them. As long as they perceive an effort to emotionally influence them, they are likely to generate cognitive blocks, or to “shut down” emotionally. These blocks, even when effective in the short term – may not be as effective over time. Regardless, it seems that when media is most effective at shifting attitudes, it is usually not trying, or at least not perceived by the media consumer to be trying.

Media professionals should recognize that this review has spoken about media effects in terms of averages. But individuals differ in their susceptibility to media. For instance, people who tend to mistake fiction for fact tend to exhibit a larger media influence than those who do not make such confusions.65 And perhaps surprisingly, heavy viewers of television discount television information to a greater extent than light viewers—they are more aware of media bias and therefore employ greater cognitive vigilance.66

For media producers, there is much emphasis on building intergroup empathy through more accurate depictions of stigmatized groups, as well as more empathic characterization. But producers should be aware that the relationship between empathy and media is complex. Empathy may simply lead to personalization or sub-categorization (where a media consumer may say, “Oh, but this character is different than the rest”), and therefore not generalize to the rest of the group. Also, when such efforts are made too explicitly, consumers will be vigilant against “persuasion”.67 Indeed, media attempts to shift attitudes, when perceived as overt, can backfire, resulting in even harsher stereotypes and attitudes against the other group.

65 M Mares. (1996). The Role of Source confusions in television’s cultivation of social reality judgments. Human Communication Research, v.23, pp.278-297.66 LJ Shrum, RS Wyer and TC O’Guinn. (1998). The effects of television consumption on social perceptions: The use of priming procedures to investigate psychological processes. Journal of Consumer Research, v.24, pp.447-458.67 SJ Sherman and E Corty. (1984). Cognitive Heuristics. In RS Wyer and TK Srull (eds), Handbook of Social Cognition (v.1 pp.189-286). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. See also, LJ Shrum. (2001). Processing Strategy Moderates the Cultivation Effect. Human Communication Research, v.27, pp.94-120.

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About the AOCMF-Funded Research LaboratoriesThe AOCMF has commissioned three sets of studies conducted by leading scientists in multiple fields at Harvard, MIT and The New School for Social Research.

The multidisciplinary team of investigators for AOCMF research includes:

Wendy Mendes, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

Dr. Mendes runs the Health & Psychophysiology Laboratory at the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Her research concentrates broadly on studying how the mind influences the body, with a specific interest in intergroup relations and stigmatization, and the effects of emotion and stress states on cognitive processing, behavior, and physiology. In particular, she examines how thoughts and feelings shape bodily responses, as well as how bodily changes can shape cognition, to look at how people manage and attempt to control their racial biases and how those regulatory attempts often fail resulting in revealing greater racial bias. This multi-method approach including physiological responses, electromyography, autonomic reactivity, neuro-endocrine responses, electroencephalography, and startle reflex non-verbal responses, cognitive performance, and self-reported emotions and appraisals opens a new perspective on the development of stereotyping and biases.

• Mendes Lab (Psychophysiology) Question: How does exposure to media depicting violence against one’s group that person in a subsequent interaction with a member of the perpetrating group? Method: Compare the effects of different media stimuli—written news story, news footage, non-fiction film—showing violence against one’s group.

Jeremy Ginges, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Department of Psychology, New School for Social Research

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Dr. Ginges’s social psychology research is centered on intergroup conflict, negotiation and cooperation; sacred values and moral reasoning across cultures; and political violence and suicide attacks. Having done extensive research on how conflict resolution strategies for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be improved, Ginges’ survey of 4,000 Palestinians and Israelis between 2004 and 2008 for the National Science Foundation and Defense Department revealed that moral beliefs are built upon inviolable core values. Strategies involving material compensation for dropping those values will fail as these “sacred values” are defended regardless of cost. Instead, this survey found that “symbolic” gestures of concessions, such as an apology or recognition of rights, was more likely to draw parties to the negotiation table.

• Ginges Lab (Behavioral) Question: When does group-based slight create outrage? How does outrage differ from shame, anger or rage? Does it differ when it is interpersonal versus group-based? Personally experienced versus vicarious (via media)?

Rebecca Saxe, Ph.D. Assistant Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MITEmile Bruneau, Ph.D. Post-Doctoral Fellow, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT

Dr. Saxe’s lab conducts social cognitive neuroscience studies in order to understand the neural basis of perception and reasoning about other people. Delving into a new area of inquiry in the field, the Saxe lab uses methods including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), neuropsychological patient studies, and eye-tracking and behavioral methods, to look into how the brain - an electrical and biological machine - constructs abstract thoughts.

• Saxe Lab (Neuroimaging) Question: Do acts of “recognition” or “positive intergroup contact” alleviate hostile outgroup perceptions? Do these things hold the same effect when experienced via media? Method: 1) Establish the basic neural signatures of hostile out-group social perception (2 studies: reasoning, empathy-shock). 2) Compare the effect of positive intergroup interaction on reducing these signatures. 3) Compare the effect of vicarious positive intergroup interaction (media images of these interactions) on reducing these signatures.

Nichole Argo, M.S. Political Science, MIT; M.A. International Policy Studies, Stanford. Researcher in the Ginges and Mendes labs.

Nichole is working towards a doctorate in psychology at The New School for Social Research. She coordinates the Media and Intergroup Relations Project, and is a co-Principle Investigator on two of the experiments. She was previously funded by the United States Institute for Peace to explore how social networks and relationships influence militant mobilization and by the Jebsen Center for Counterterrorism Studies on a project that models radicalization according to findings from social neuroscience. Her interest in media impacts derived from her work as a journalist and field researcher in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Her research has shown that willingness to engage in rebellion correlates positively with: outrage over recent events that are perceived as ‘unfair’and individual value orientations that are communally- rather than self-focused.

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