Media, Culture, and Behavior

I think it's pretty well-established and widespread idea that media has a massive effect on culture and how we act, even if we don't realize it.  Many parents try to shield their children from the media, for fear that some of the images or portrayals will have a negative effect on their growth.  Though there are many specific theories of how media affects us, I think that the concept of "social learning" serves as an umbrella term for most of them.  Social learning, along with the Bandura child experiment, illustrate how media can dictate our decisions and shape our personalities.

The "social learning" concept boils down to individuals imitating or shaping their personalities and opinions after something they're shown, sometimes without even realizing it.  Women and girls may begin be affected by the images of ultra-thin, inhumanely beautiful women in advertising (as shown in Killing Us Softly), and try to imitate them because they think that this is what is normal or beautiful.  Boys and men may begin to think they must be aggressive or intimidating to be a real man due to portrayals of machismo in the media, as was explored in Tough Guise.  There are a myriad of possibilities of how someone could be affected by the media, but these are fairly basic and the easiest to recognize, I think.

In this experiment carried out by Albert Bandura in 1961, children were shown a video of a woman punching, kicking, and throwing an inflatable "Bobo" doll, and then put into a room with the same doll.  The study found that the children were more likely to do violence against the doll, in some cases in the exact same manner, after watching an adult after watching the videos.  The children who watched the same video that ended with the adult being rewarded for attacking the doll were even more likely than others to attack. The conclusion was that this was social learning at work.  The children were imitating what was shown to them, thinking that it was acceptable behavior.  This, like the examples shown in Killing Us Softly and Tough Guise, simply and clearly illustrates how social learning occurs.  Though children are without question more impressionable than adults are, the media still has entirely different sets of images, more subtle than those in this experiment, that would have a similar affect on adults.