Concept
cultivation theory
Gerbner’s theory that heavy television viewers’ perception of social reality is closer to the recurring messages of the on-screen world than that of similar light viewers; it sees the effect as accumulation spread over years.
Cultivation theory sees the effect of television not as a chain of “one message, one reaction” but as the cumulative result of a story system spread over years. The theory is the third prong (cultivation analysis) of the Cultural Indicators project run by George Gerbner and his team at the Annenberg School for Communication. The central hypothesis is this: heavy television viewers, compared with demographically similar but lighter viewers, perceive the real world in line with the most common and recurring messages of the on-screen world.
Its name comes from agriculture: a single seed does not yield a crop in a day; repetition and time are needed. That is why the theory does not measure the instant effect of a single programme or whether viewers become aggressive; it studies long-term, total exposure. As a method, television content is counted first (message system analysis), and then, in national surveys, viewers’ beliefs about the real world are compared by amount of television viewing (heavy viewers).
In Turkish the theory is called “ekme” (“sowing”), “yetiştirme” (“raising”) or “kültivasyon” (“cultivation”). Concepts such as mean world syndrome, mainstreaming and resonance belong to the same family of theory. Over the years the theory has received serious criticism from researchers such as Hirsch, Hughes, Doob and Macdonald, and Potter; meta-analyses, meanwhile, show that the effect is small but stable. For details see Cultivation Theory.
Example
In a survey, heavy television viewers answering “yes” more often than demographically similar light viewers to the question “Would you be afraid to walk in your neighbourhood at night?”