April 9, 2015 • 35 mins
Is there more violence in the world today, or have we just been watching too many CSI shows? In this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, Julie and Robert explore cultivation theory and the idea that we live in a mean, mean world.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you're welcome to Stuff to blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb. You know I'm
Julie Douglas. Julie. What do you fear the most? Dear?
The most fear dear? Yeah, that's a pretty good one. Yeah,
(00:24):
that's the fear itself, right, might as well fear it.
Sure it's incapacitating. Yeah, so not like wild dogs or anything. No,
no griffins. You um. Probably I probably fear like all
the mundane stuff now that we'll get into in a bit.
Used to it was alien abductions though when I was
when I was like a junior high kid, I was
(00:47):
terrified of alien abductions. And then I went through like
a one week phase or maybe it was a month
in high school where I was terrified of car rex
Like I was just convinced that if my family got
in a car, we'd go out. You know, we're driving
to look at Christmas lights, and I was like, this
is a needless rest. We were clearly all going to perish.
And then it passed. Is this because you had seen
(01:07):
some some sort of public service announcement driving I bet
so I imagine that both of these fears were directly
related to the stuff that I was absorbing, be it
unsolved mysteries in the case of the alien abductions, or yes,
some special about highway safety in the case of the
vehicle fear. And you know now that I think about it,
when I was around eight years old, I saw a
(01:28):
documentary on an atom bomb, and I remember having nightmares
about being with my family on a cliff and watching
the sun melt and everything around me just perish. Um. So, yeah,
I think if you guys are listening alone, you're going
to start to see this link here between media consumption
and how it informs our fears. Indeed, we're talking about
(01:50):
something called mean world syndrome, which is which is a
fascinating theory they were going to unwrap for you here,
and it it really God, it's really really gets its
tentacles into just about everything in our daily life. It does.
And before we explore that a bit more, we want
to thank listener Joseph who wrote us about our episode
(02:11):
The Dark and sent us a link to a survey
about what Americans fear most, which kicked off this whole
exploration of the mean world syndrome, which in which there
is also a documentary. It's a two thousand and ten documentary,
and we thought we would just pull a couple of
quotes from it. Yeah. This comes from George Gebner, professor
of communications and founder of cultivation theory UM, died in
(02:35):
two thousand five. He says, most of us live rather
insulated lives, and we don't meet too many people of
other groups, of other races, other ethnic backgrounds than our own.
Most of what we know about other races, other ethnic
groups we know from television, and from television we get
some very peculiar types of information. Now they interview a
(02:55):
bunch of other people, including Michael Morgan and marsh mcclehen,
who said, on the difficulty of measuring the effect of
media on views perceptions quote, it's like the fish in
the water. We don't know who discovered water, but we
know it wasn't the fish. A pervasive medium, a pervasive
environment is always beyond perception end quote. So that I
(03:18):
think is the underlying conundrum here. We know that we're
consuming media, UM, we know that we're consuming a lot
more than we used to and in various different ways,
but we're not entirely sure of the effects, but we
do have Gardner's research to give us a clue of
houses actually informing our worldview. Yeah, in worldview here is
(03:42):
key because because we've hit on many times in this podcast, Uh,
reality is different for everyone. There's certainly the subjective reality
and an objective reality, but everyone's worldview is a little different,
and everyone's everyone's model of reality in which we house
ourselves you a little different and what what we build
it out? After? What degree does media play into our
(04:05):
construction of this particular world? Does objectivity really exist when
you're trying to filter information through your own experiences and ideas?
And that's a bit of what we'll get into today.
But first we want to talk about this two thousand
and fourteen Chapman University survey and it was a nationwide
(04:27):
year long survey by the way UM. It was a
poll of fifteen hundred Americans concerning their fears and concerns.
And Dr Christopher Bator, who led this effort, said, what
we learned through this initial survey that we had to
phrase the questions according to fear versus concerned to capture
the information correctly. So that's how we are presenting it,
(04:49):
and indeed that is how they parse it out. And
the reason for that is because fear and worry, although
very closely related, have a kind of temporal difference, at
least in my mind, uh it does. Fear feels immediate
and worrying feels like a sort of existential threat, something
that might happen in the in the future, whereas fear
(05:11):
as the immediate future. Yeah, worry has kind of, you know,
a certain amount of inevitability about it. I find like
I worry about the things that will come to pass
or may come to pass. But fear are sort of
the the oddball things that might pop up on the
on the on the dice roll of life, you know,
the more random things. Right. Yeah. So top five things
(05:33):
that Americans fear the most. This is what came out
of this survey. The number one fear walking alone at
night okay, very primal, okay. Number two becoming the victim
of identity theft, very modern. Number three safety on the internet.
Number four being the victim of a mass or random shooting,
(05:55):
which ties to what you said in terms of fear
and fear acts of randomness, right, And number five sticking
out like a sore thumb in this list. Public speaking,
That's that seems kind of crazy to me, because like,
I'm not a fan of public speaking. I kind of
view it it's kind of like vomiting while I'm doing it.
I dislike it, But I don't spend the rest of
(06:16):
my life worrying about the neck or fearing the next
time I'm going to vomit or have to speak publicly, Like, yeah,
it's going to happen. What can I do about it?
And you feel spent afterward? Right, You feel like you've
got a blank slate to build upon. Um. But yeah,
I think that speaks a lot to how much people
really dislike getting up and talking in front of other people.
(06:37):
And I was thinking about that, was like, what does
that mean. That means that they're afraid of failing and
they're afraid of being judged, And that all makes sense.
But then I thought why, though, why so? Why so
common a fear? And I thought, I wonder if it's
because in this day and age, public speaking isn't just
(06:57):
speaking to two people in the room. It is now
one person who is recording the video of it and
putting it online so that two million other people can
see it and judge you. So just recording a video
for YouTube could be considered public speaking, Yes, I think
I think that it could be considered that way. It's
just who is my audience? What are they going to
think of me? Am I going to fail or succeed
(07:19):
at this? But that's that's of interest. But what about
worry or concern? All right? Well, the Chapman Survey for
worrying and concern breaks it down as follows. Number one
having identity stolen on the Internet, number two corporate surveillance
of Internet activity, number three running out of money in
(07:40):
the future for government surveillance of Internet activity, and number
five becoming ill or sick. So here we see kind
of another lopsided array of things here, because becoming ill
and sick, that's timeless like and reasonable that we're all
going to worry about what's going to happen when some
illness hits us, perhaps something we have little or no
ability to uh to to prevent um. And then running
(08:03):
out of money in the future, I think we can
all relate to that to some point or another. You
know that, what to what extent will I not be
able to feed myself? How's myself feed myself, feed the
people I love. How's the people I love in the future. Yeah,
and again this list feels more incremental than immediate. Yeah,
it's like what will what will it be like for
my future self? Will that will my future self have
(08:25):
to deal with these various things. Whereas those fears like
the two that caught out to me the most walking
alone at night, Uh, certainly in safety on the internet,
Like those are two that do you think about all
the time when you're when you're in those environments. I
don't know if I would say I outright have fear
about safety on the internet, but certainly walking down the
(08:45):
dark street, I mean, you just can't help it, but
fear a little feel a little apprehensive. Well in terms
of internet security too and finances. I feel like it's
a given these days that at some point your information
is going to be accessed or compromised. So I can
see how that's also in the minds of people. Another
thing that the survey revealed, And remember the survey covered
(09:05):
only people, so the survey isn't exhaustive, but it did
reveal that a decent amount of people who were surveyed
exhibit magical thinking. So more specifically, these sort of causal
relationships between actions and events that are not based on
reason and observation. So, for example, in this study, more
(09:27):
than of participants believe that Bigfoot is a real creature,
about half believe that Satan causes most evil in the world.
Pin it on Satan, Okay, and uh think they can
influence the world with physical thought. I eat positive thoughts
all of the book The Secret. So this one is
(09:51):
a little trickier though, right, because as you had pointed
out earlier when we were talking about this, do they
go specifically into like what do they mean by effect
things with positive thoughts? Because there's, um, you know, one
column where it's like, yeah, I think I'm gonna do
great on this test. I'm well prepared. I'm gonna just
harness my positivity, and the other one is I'm just
(10:14):
gonna stare at the answers and by magical thinking, I'm
going to get the right one. Yeah, there's there's certainly
a difference between just going into something with a positive
mindset and trying to manifest uh situations in life just
through pure thought. Um, it's interesting. I would I would certainly,
you know, I certainly believe in that to a certain
(10:36):
extent um, you know, just the power of positive thinking
on the whole Satan Bigfoot thing. I actually think most
of the evil caused in the world is due to
big Foot. So I actually that's where I fall in
that line. Do you think you think he's kind of
like the shadow of Satan character? Yeah, yeah, I think so.
I think he's Satan's furry agent on Earth. All right. So,
(10:57):
I think what this data is bareing out or are
bearing is that when it comes to cold, hard calculation
about the physical world around us, we're not always engaging
in critical objective thought. And this is when perception can
falter exactly, and it falters along lines that have nothing
(11:18):
to do with you know, skunk gates and devils. Uh.
The Chapman survey here also found that the majority of
majority of Americans not only actively fear crimes like child abduction,
gang violence, sexual assault, and an other sort of you know,
often sensationalized crimes of this this nature, they also believe
these crimes had increased over the past twenty years. Now.
(11:41):
This is particularly interesting when you look at statistical data
from police and FBI records that actually showed that crime
has decreased in America over the past two decades. The
fact that that often often gets criminologists in trouble when
they when they start pointing these these facts out when
they say, I mean that the crime rate has actually
gone down, no matter what it feels like. And certainly
(12:04):
you know if you if you, if your life has
been touched by by violent crime of one type or another,
that that that those those statistics are going to seem
less reliable. But likewise, what you have, what if your
life hasn't been directly touched by this violence, but you
simply are privy to it on a daily basis through
your consumption of media. Well, and I think what colors
(12:26):
this perception to that violence has gone up is that
you often hear the that the United States, of all
the developed countries, has one of the highest homicide rates.
And then if you look at an FBI two thousand
and eleven statistic of the more than twelve thousand homicides,
you'll see that seventy of them were caused by firearms.
(12:47):
It was homicide by firearms. So it kind of there's
there's a there's an actual support of real threat there.
But then there's the overall statistics which would tell you
on a day to day basis us that crime has
actually decreased. So it gets kind of sticky with this,
especially when you bring firearms into the equation. And if
(13:10):
you guys are interested in that, um, we encourage you
to check out the article from The Atlantic. It's called
quote gun Violence in America, the thirteen key questions with
thirteen concercise answers. It's by Jonathan Straight And that'll give
you a bit more information on the gun factor, which
is very nuanced, complex and more than we can bite
(13:33):
off in this particular episode. Yeah, and I'll include a
link to that article on the landing page for this
episode is stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Alright. So,
some of the other contributing factors to perceived fear, according
to the Chapman University survey, is that people with lower
levels of education will exhibit significantly higher levels of fear
(13:56):
regarding a bunch of stuff like personal safety, their future,
running out of money, getting sick, Internet usage again, identity, theft,
criminal victimization, government, the fear of government being oppressive, and
so on and so forth, immigration, natural disasters, and man
made disasters. And they found that watching television talk shows
(14:20):
in particular UH with a high frequency was strongly related
to fear, and not surprisingly, a studied diet of two
crime true crime TV shows affects level of fear and individuals.
And they have just more and more data on this.
If you want to check it out, The actually break
down fear factors into gender, political affiliation, race, and so
(14:41):
on and so forth. So if you want to see
more about that, definitely check out the University of Chapman's
Fear Survey of Americans. And the reason we we brought
out all of this data for you guys is that
we felt like it was a good basis to explore
the overall concept of mean world syndrome. Yes, mean world syndrome,
(15:01):
which stems from cultivation theory. Now, cultivation theory is a
social theory developed by George Gebner, who we mentioned earlier
and Larry Gross from the University of Pennsylvania in the
mid nineties sixties, and it examines the long term effects
of television. So in essence, the idea here is that
TV is cultivating our culture. UH think of you know,
(15:23):
Shepherd Fairies, Obey graff d. I think of John Carpenter
as they live with the the the the the the
glasses that reveal what television is really informing onto the
minds of the public um. And you have a pretty
good idea about what's going on here. The TV is
feeding your brain. It's informing our minds, both explicitly and
implicitly on who and what we are, what sort of
(15:45):
world we live in. So it's cultivating the viewers conceptions
of social reality. Now, Groner and Gross study television programming
for twenty two years, and each year they randomly selected
a week in real hoarded prime time programming as well
as children's weekend programming, and they identify the quantity of
(16:06):
violence and programs, and they found them to be pretty
stable overtime. For instance, dramas that feature violence averaged five
violent acts per viewing hour. However, they found some inequalities
in victimhood, with older people, women, and minorities particularly at
risk in these acts of violence. So even though minorities
(16:28):
were underrepresented on television, when they did appear, they were
much more likely to be victims of violence. Now, to
analyze the effects of the violence on the minds of
the participants of Governor and Gross correlated the data from
the content analysis of television were survey data from people
who were classified based on the amount of time they
spent watching TV. So of course you've got two groups here,
(16:49):
heavy watchers of TV four plus hours and light watchers
less than two hours. And using a survey he targeted
four attitudes. So the first one was chances of involvement
with violence. So what they found is that light viewers
predicted their weekly odds of being involved in violence or
something like one in one hundred, while heavy viewers said
(17:10):
it was more like one in ten. Then the second
attitude was fear of walking alone at night. Women were
more afraid than men, but both sexes who were heavy
viewers overestimated criminal activity, believing it to be ten times
more than figures actually indicate. The third was perceived activity
(17:31):
of police. Heavy viewers believe that about five percent of
societies involved with law enforcement, and in comparison, the light
viewers thought it looks like one which is about right
and general mistrust of people. That's the fourth attitude. People
who were heavy viewers tended to see other people's actions
and motives more negatively. And if you drill down a
(17:54):
little bit further into griner and grasses work, you'll find
that they were looking at these very specific behaviors emerging,
and they define them as mainstreaming, which is the process
by which heavy viewing of television resulted in the similarity
of perspective among viewers. And it didn't matter what they're
(18:16):
their socio economic class was, or their education, those who
were heavy TV viewers had this perspective. They all shared
that there's a sort of mainstreaming of what they thought
was going on. And then something called resonance, which was
that if someone had a real life violent incident that
(18:36):
happened to them, well, that was amplifying their experience and
making it feel like it was more prevalent. And certainly
the yeah, the resonance residence makes perfect sense. You have
something like this, it touches your real life. It's going
to completely color your perception of reality, even and even
the even the news that you happen to catch on
(18:56):
in the evening. Yeah, because you could in effect be
experiencing that over and over again via these different situations,
whether it's a report on the news or it's um
some sort of c s i UH scenario. But the
thing about this mean world syndrome is that it is
not just about violence, it actually extends out further into
(19:19):
the world. It's tendrils go a bit more into the
social fabric. Indeed, yeah, I mean it's not television is
not a media or not only cultivating our ideas about
about what's going on in the world. They're cultivating our
ideas about what what the human species is, what what
our bodies should look like. Um. There's a two thousand
three paper that was published in the Journal of Youth
(19:41):
and Adolescence titled the Effect of thin ideal television commercials
on Body dissatisfaction and schema activation during early adolescence. So,
in this study, they presented two groups of girls with
different sets of ads. One set had undernourished women in
it and the other set did not. They exposed both
(20:01):
groups of girls to these ads and the results the
girls who saw the ads with the emaciated models experienced
immediate episodes of insecurity and distress about their weight. What's more,
two years later, the same girls still reported greater dissatisfaction
with their bodies as compared to the other group of
girls who didn't have to witness the emaciated models in
(20:24):
the commercials. So the idea here is the continued exposure
to unrealistic body types in the in the media affected
the girls perceptions about what a normal, healthy, human female
body looks like. Again, the media is cultivating our understanding
of reality, and in this case, it's cultivating our ideas
about what your body should look like. That's fascinating to me.
(20:45):
So over a number of years, this database gets built
up in your mind about what is normal, when in fact,
if you look at the normal statistics for proportions and women,
it's nothing like what is represented in media. Yeah, so
it's it's it's not not only the outer world that
is that is skewed, but it's also the inner world.
It's both looking out and looking inward. Uh, you end
(21:07):
up with unrealistic expectations about what's gonna happen. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break. When we get back,
we are going to talk more about the lovers that
we're pulling here with this meanworld syndrome. Alright, we're back. Um.
(21:28):
You know, in all of this, I kept thinking about
the television series Sons of Anarchy, which I think I
mentioned previously. Just in the space of a month sort
of been want bench watched the entire run of the
show like seven series seasons of it, and the whole time,
I was just really struck by how violent the show is.
And I'm I'm kind of I'm used to violent shows,
(21:50):
but I think the based on some some online staff,
I was looking at the members of the biker gang
in this series kill a hundred and fifty three people
in the main care Jack's teller, who you're supposed to
be the most sympathetic towards throughout the show, kills forty
six people here in the course of the show, like
every episode has some sort of horrible, cold blooded murder
(22:11):
in it and uh, and so I just kept thinking, like,
what is this? What is this doing to me? You
know what? How is this affecting my awareness? And and
am I more afraid of Outlaw Motorcycle Club now than
I was in the past? I don't know. You know,
That's how I felt with Breaking Bad. Um. I love
that series, but it was really hard to watch and
it gave me the sense that the world is a rotten,
(22:33):
stinking thing. And that's why I like to watch you
Gaba Gabba. It's a lot more positive and uh, and
it's easier to binge watch the entire the entire run
of the show and it's got great music too, exactly. Um.
In terms of binge watching, uh, this is an interesting
area when especially talking about cultivation theory and mean world syndrome,
(22:56):
because I mean, binge watching has been around for a while,
but though not in name, uh, for a while, it's
been possible to get the entire run of a series
and just throw yourself into it. For a while, it's
been possible to go to the video Stongeres were in
a bunch of stuff and watch it before they can
lose yourself in in in a book, in a comic book,
what have you. But in recent years we've seen been
(23:18):
binge watching pushed as an acceptable and even uh preferable
model of media consumption. Netflix puts out you know, all
of the new season of the House of Cards and
you and you can just watch all of it, just
lose yourself in the show. Or Amazon Prime i think,
follows the same model with some of their shows that
(23:38):
have come out, which is really enjoyable. I have to
say I'm not slamming it, because it can be really
great to lose yourself in the show and just and
not have to wait after each cliffhanger On the other hand,
it's normalizing this sort of binge watching behavior that we
might not have all engaged in before. And if you've
got ten different series chewed up that you're binge watching,
that's a lot of consumption of these various world models.
(24:04):
And uh so it's, like I said, it's a new
area for the most part. So there hasn't been a
lot of research done on binge watching and what it's
doing to us. But there was a two thousand fifteen
studied by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin,
and they found that the more lonely and depressed you are,
the more likely you are to binge watch. They conducted
(24:25):
a survey on three hundred sixteen eighteen to twenty nine
year olds on how often they watched TV, how often
they had feelings of loneliness, depression, and self regulation deficiency,
and finally how often they binge watched television. They found
that the more lonely and depressed you are, the more
likely you are to binge watch television. And an attempt
(24:45):
to distance yourself from what's troubling you, you know, to
escape from your fears and escape from your anxieties. And
UH and simply become one with the fictional world. And
as with a lot of binge behavior, loneliness to press
and self regulation deficiency are all key factors here. So again,
you dived into the deep end of the TV pool
(25:06):
in order to forget what's bothering you. Now back to
the question though, is it harmful? Right? Because, as we said,
doesn't feel harmful when you're engaging in it. Um. This
is where the researchers from the University of Texas at
Austin argue that you have all these other factors that
are potentially setting in physical fatigue, higher propensity for obesity,
(25:26):
as well as other health concerns UH factor and potential
work neglect, potential relationship neglect, and you have a potentially
destructive cycle on your hands. Now, imagine that if all
you ever watched, you binge watched was true crime TV.
Okay a can you would have this sense that this
was a rotten, stinking world And and a follow up
(25:50):
of sorts to Gripner and Grosses true crime TV watching,
Glenn Sparks and Susan Helsing at Pretty University surveyed one
hundreds and three jury eligible adults about their TV watching habits.
They found that the heavy TV crime viewers estimated two
and a half times more real world deaths due to
(26:13):
murder than non viewers of this type of television. So
that that's a statistic that would really tell you that
the mindsets of people are being colored, particularly when they
are engaging in this type of TV, which over and
over again you see these terrible crime scenes, these crimes
(26:36):
that have been perpetuated against people, a lot of women. Um.
And then the other thing that they found again that
that that Gardner and Gross had found, was that heavy
true crime TV watchers misjudged the number of law enforcement
officers and attorneys in the total workforce. So lawyers, police
they each make up about less than one percent of workforce,
(26:58):
but those surveyed estimated it at more than six and
eight respectively. Yeah, because you end up just consuming, first
of all, some of the worst stories out there about
about what happens in the course of human life. And
then and then just my this focusing on all the
details of the criminal investigation, and many times they're going
(27:20):
to be a high profile case that's covered in these
shows too, where it's going to have an unrealistic portrayal
of how many people show up at a crime scene,
what kind of resources are leveled. It's it's solving it. Yeah,
and Sparks and Helsing also found that the True crime
TV watchers were also more likely to be fearful about
walking alone in a city at night. Of course, right
you're watching True crime TV, um and it reminds me
(27:43):
of the episode we did about phobias, and we were
talking about spiders, and if I'm recalling this correctly, in
one of the experiments, those people who were identified as
having serious phobias about spiders were asked to draw the
spiders and try to figure out the dimensions. And what
(28:05):
they found in those people with the really high phobias
of spiders is that their dimensions were huge. They were
largely outsized compared to the actual realistic dimensions of the spider.
But those who didn't have the phobia had the more
or less correct dimensions of the spider. And I think
about this. I think this is like the spider in
(28:25):
the brain of fear just expanding out in people who
are on a steady diet of this type of TV. Yeah. Yeah,
you end up in a situation where you think, every
time I step out the door, I'm potentially going to
be assaulted or thrown into a van, uh, targeted by
a serial murder, etcetera. Well, especially if you are enfolded
in social media right because you earned them being served
(28:48):
up even more and more stories of what's going on
in culture, um when it has to do with crime. Yeah,
I mean, just think about your you know, your own
interaction with social media and and crime. I mean, what
happens when you hear gunshots in your neighborhood. If you
ever have to to hear that, you're likely to what
head over to the neighborhood association Facebook group and uh
(29:09):
and see what everyone else is thinking. Did someone call
it in? What is someone that you know? Where? Does
someone think it occurred? That sort of thing? And then
in the case of larger, large scale violent to acts,
you know, acts of terrorism or what have you, you know,
you end up heading like over to Twitter, see what's
the you know, the current like breaking news about it, because,
as we've seen, we often see accounts of traumatic events
(29:34):
like this really breaking out on Twitter in real time
right at the cutting edge of the story, often the
unverified cutting edge of the story, where there hasn't been
enough time to validate all the information coming in. So
we have this huge ability to to live right there
at the threshold of what's going on. Uh, to binge
(29:55):
on the chaos, the disturbing details at times, the compassion,
but also that the hate that spirals out across the
social media following an occurrence like that, right, and what
you're seeing there in those instances, this um was accretion
really of social media and the responses is a kind
of emotional contagion. And we've talked about this before, this
(30:18):
idea that that anxiety is spreading throughout a network. And Uh,
if only we had some sort of experiments, say a
Facebook experiment we could point to and which they actually
changed the algorithm and manipulated the feeds for people so
that people either saw overwhelmingly positive stories and their newspeeds
(30:42):
or overwhelmingly negative stories. Ah. Yes, we do have that data. Yeah,
and this is great because there they're toying with the
way that the media, in the form of Facebook can
cultivate the users. Yeah, we're talking about In June of
last year, Facebook did conduct an emotional contagion experiment on
(31:03):
almost seven hundred thousand users, and they did, in fact
manipulate their their news feeds, and what they saw is
that those people producing fewer upbeating more negative expressions correlated
with the negative stories that were in their news speed.
And the reverse also held true, and researchers produced the
number of negative posts visible. So you see this mean
(31:27):
world syndrome at play really in the responses of the users.
And of course this drew a lot of ire from
people because they felt like they were being manipulated. They
felt like Facebook was being shady. Uh, and perhaps they were,
but I will say that you have more than eight
hundred million people logging in every day. UM, that's usable
(31:52):
scientific research, and so you can understand why Facebook and
why scientists social scientists aren't interested in trying to dip
into it, although their methods maybe we're less than desirable. Yeah,
it's it's interesting though, how like the main headline for
that story ended up being Facebook is experimenting on you
without your knowledge, tying directly into some of those fears
(32:14):
and worries we were talking about at the top of
the podcast, the fear that that's so corporate and or
government entity is is looking over your shoulder, manipulating something
in your life. Um, as opposed to the ultimately the
more disturbing idea of just how to what degree we
are cultivated with to what degree our worldview in our
(32:34):
minds and even our self reflection are cultivated by these, uh,
these fonts of media. So my question here is, do
you think at some point will become savvy enough that
we understand that mean world syndrome is at play and
things will equal out? In other words, uh, perceived threat
versus real threat come a little bit closer to each other.
I would hope. So, I mean that would certainly, I
(32:56):
would hope. So it's it's not very encouraging given that
this that cultivation theory has been around so long, you know,
and it's there's not like a cultivation theory awareness button
flashing in the corner of your screen when you've been
on the same channel for too long or anything of
that nature. Because I mean, also, it's kind of like, uh,
it's kind of like preparing a bath, right, the media
(33:16):
prepares a bath for you. They decide how much hot
water goes in, how much cold water, and then you
get into it and it feels all right, and you
don't question it. You never stop to think, should I
be bathing in a potter water or a colder bath. Well,
especially with this medium, with TV, which has been around
and kind of was stable for a long time, and
then other types of media came on board, and then
(33:38):
all of a sudden your access to information into fiction
and nonfiction um exploded. So it is an interesting time
right now. It will be interesting to see ten years
from now what sort of studies come out of it. Yeah,
because I mean right now, especially with Facebook, And I
think I mentioned this a bit in the some of
the race episodes we're talking about, Like if you have
(33:59):
kind of an an extreme opinion about anything, be at
race related or not purely political, what what have you? Uh,
you can find a place on Facebook, in social media,
you can find a blog, You can find somewhere that
will completely cultivate those ideas that you have. They won't
question them, won't challenge you, and you can just you
can use your retreat into that that particular abyss. And
(34:23):
that's one of the strengths of social media and the
Internet age. But it's uh, it's undeniably a weakness. Well,
I think it appropriate to read a quote from George Girpner,
who back in the day said, quote, our studies have
shown that growing up from infancy with this unprecedented diet
of TV violence has three consequences, which in combination I
call the mean world syndrome. What this means is that
(34:45):
if you are growing up in a home where there
is more than say, three hours of television per day
for all practical purposes, you live in a meaner world
and act accordingly. Then your next door neighbor who lives
in the same world but watches the US television the
programming reinforces the worst fears and apprehensions and paranoia of people. There.
(35:08):
You have it all right? Well, if hey, you want
to check out more episodes of the podcast, you want
to check out the landing page for this uh this
particular episode with the links out to related content and
outside content. Head on over to stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. And if you have thoughts on the
mean World syndrome or anything else, please do share those
thoughts with us. You can do so by sending us
(35:29):
an email at below the mind at how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you're welcome to Stuff to blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb. You know I'm
Julie Douglas. Julie. What do you fear the most? Dear?
The most fear dear? Yeah, that's a pretty good one. Yeah,
(00:24):
that's the fear itself, right, might as well fear it.
Sure it's incapacitating. Yeah, so not like wild dogs or anything. No,
no griffins. You um. Probably I probably fear like all
the mundane stuff now that we'll get into in a bit.
Used to it was alien abductions though when I was
when I was like a junior high kid, I was
(00:47):
terrified of alien abductions. And then I went through like
a one week phase or maybe it was a month
in high school where I was terrified of car rex
Like I was just convinced that if my family got
in a car, we'd go out. You know, we're driving
to look at Christmas lights, and I was like, this
is a needless rest. We were clearly all going to perish.
And then it passed. Is this because you had seen
(01:07):
some some sort of public service announcement driving I bet
so I imagine that both of these fears were directly
related to the stuff that I was absorbing, be it
unsolved mysteries in the case of the alien abductions, or yes,
some special about highway safety in the case of the
vehicle fear. And you know now that I think about it,
when I was around eight years old, I saw a
(01:28):
documentary on an atom bomb, and I remember having nightmares
about being with my family on a cliff and watching
the sun melt and everything around me just perish. Um. So, yeah,
I think if you guys are listening alone, you're going
to start to see this link here between media consumption
and how it informs our fears. Indeed, we're talking about
(01:50):
something called mean world syndrome, which is which is a
fascinating theory they were going to unwrap for you here,
and it it really God, it's really really gets its
tentacles into just about everything in our daily life. It does.
And before we explore that a bit more, we want
to thank listener Joseph who wrote us about our episode
(02:11):
The Dark and sent us a link to a survey
about what Americans fear most, which kicked off this whole
exploration of the mean world syndrome, which in which there
is also a documentary. It's a two thousand and ten documentary,
and we thought we would just pull a couple of
quotes from it. Yeah. This comes from George Gebner, professor
of communications and founder of cultivation theory UM, died in
(02:35):
two thousand five. He says, most of us live rather
insulated lives, and we don't meet too many people of
other groups, of other races, other ethnic backgrounds than our own.
Most of what we know about other races, other ethnic
groups we know from television, and from television we get
some very peculiar types of information. Now they interview a
(02:55):
bunch of other people, including Michael Morgan and marsh mcclehen,
who said, on the difficulty of measuring the effect of
media on views perceptions quote, it's like the fish in
the water. We don't know who discovered water, but we
know it wasn't the fish. A pervasive medium, a pervasive
environment is always beyond perception end quote. So that I
(03:18):
think is the underlying conundrum here. We know that we're
consuming media, UM, we know that we're consuming a lot
more than we used to and in various different ways,
but we're not entirely sure of the effects, but we
do have Gardner's research to give us a clue of
houses actually informing our worldview. Yeah, in worldview here is
(03:42):
key because because we've hit on many times in this podcast, Uh,
reality is different for everyone. There's certainly the subjective reality
and an objective reality, but everyone's worldview is a little different,
and everyone's everyone's model of reality in which we house
ourselves you a little different and what what we build
it out? After? What degree does media play into our
(04:05):
construction of this particular world? Does objectivity really exist when
you're trying to filter information through your own experiences and ideas?
And that's a bit of what we'll get into today.
But first we want to talk about this two thousand
and fourteen Chapman University survey and it was a nationwide
(04:27):
year long survey by the way UM. It was a
poll of fifteen hundred Americans concerning their fears and concerns.
And Dr Christopher Bator, who led this effort, said, what
we learned through this initial survey that we had to
phrase the questions according to fear versus concerned to capture
the information correctly. So that's how we are presenting it,
(04:49):
and indeed that is how they parse it out. And
the reason for that is because fear and worry, although
very closely related, have a kind of temporal difference, at
least in my mind, uh it does. Fear feels immediate
and worrying feels like a sort of existential threat, something
that might happen in the in the future, whereas fear
(05:11):
as the immediate future. Yeah, worry has kind of, you know,
a certain amount of inevitability about it. I find like
I worry about the things that will come to pass
or may come to pass. But fear are sort of
the the oddball things that might pop up on the
on the on the dice roll of life, you know,
the more random things. Right. Yeah. So top five things
(05:33):
that Americans fear the most. This is what came out
of this survey. The number one fear walking alone at
night okay, very primal, okay. Number two becoming the victim
of identity theft, very modern. Number three safety on the internet.
Number four being the victim of a mass or random shooting,
(05:55):
which ties to what you said in terms of fear
and fear acts of randomness, right, And number five sticking
out like a sore thumb in this list. Public speaking,
That's that seems kind of crazy to me, because like,
I'm not a fan of public speaking. I kind of
view it it's kind of like vomiting while I'm doing it.
I dislike it, But I don't spend the rest of
(06:16):
my life worrying about the neck or fearing the next
time I'm going to vomit or have to speak publicly, Like, yeah,
it's going to happen. What can I do about it?
And you feel spent afterward? Right, You feel like you've
got a blank slate to build upon. Um. But yeah,
I think that speaks a lot to how much people
really dislike getting up and talking in front of other people.
(06:37):
And I was thinking about that, was like, what does
that mean. That means that they're afraid of failing and
they're afraid of being judged, And that all makes sense.
But then I thought why, though, why so? Why so
common a fear? And I thought, I wonder if it's
because in this day and age, public speaking isn't just
(06:57):
speaking to two people in the room. It is now
one person who is recording the video of it and
putting it online so that two million other people can
see it and judge you. So just recording a video
for YouTube could be considered public speaking, Yes, I think
I think that it could be considered that way. It's
just who is my audience? What are they going to
think of me? Am I going to fail or succeed
(07:19):
at this? But that's that's of interest. But what about
worry or concern? All right? Well, the Chapman Survey for
worrying and concern breaks it down as follows. Number one
having identity stolen on the Internet, number two corporate surveillance
of Internet activity, number three running out of money in
(07:40):
the future for government surveillance of Internet activity, and number
five becoming ill or sick. So here we see kind
of another lopsided array of things here, because becoming ill
and sick, that's timeless like and reasonable that we're all
going to worry about what's going to happen when some
illness hits us, perhaps something we have little or no
ability to uh to to prevent um. And then running
(08:03):
out of money in the future, I think we can
all relate to that to some point or another. You
know that, what to what extent will I not be
able to feed myself? How's myself feed myself, feed the
people I love. How's the people I love in the future. Yeah,
and again this list feels more incremental than immediate. Yeah,
it's like what will what will it be like for
my future self? Will that will my future self have
(08:25):
to deal with these various things. Whereas those fears like
the two that caught out to me the most walking
alone at night, Uh, certainly in safety on the internet,
Like those are two that do you think about all
the time when you're when you're in those environments. I
don't know if I would say I outright have fear
about safety on the internet, but certainly walking down the
(08:45):
dark street, I mean, you just can't help it, but
fear a little feel a little apprehensive. Well in terms
of internet security too and finances. I feel like it's
a given these days that at some point your information
is going to be accessed or compromised. So I can
see how that's also in the minds of people. Another
thing that the survey revealed, And remember the survey covered
(09:05):
only people, so the survey isn't exhaustive, but it did
reveal that a decent amount of people who were surveyed
exhibit magical thinking. So more specifically, these sort of causal
relationships between actions and events that are not based on
reason and observation. So, for example, in this study, more
(09:27):
than of participants believe that Bigfoot is a real creature,
about half believe that Satan causes most evil in the world.
Pin it on Satan, Okay, and uh think they can
influence the world with physical thought. I eat positive thoughts
all of the book The Secret. So this one is
(09:51):
a little trickier though, right, because as you had pointed
out earlier when we were talking about this, do they
go specifically into like what do they mean by effect
things with positive thoughts? Because there's, um, you know, one
column where it's like, yeah, I think I'm gonna do
great on this test. I'm well prepared. I'm gonna just
harness my positivity, and the other one is I'm just
(10:14):
gonna stare at the answers and by magical thinking, I'm
going to get the right one. Yeah, there's there's certainly
a difference between just going into something with a positive
mindset and trying to manifest uh situations in life just
through pure thought. Um, it's interesting. I would I would certainly,
you know, I certainly believe in that to a certain
(10:36):
extent um, you know, just the power of positive thinking
on the whole Satan Bigfoot thing. I actually think most
of the evil caused in the world is due to
big Foot. So I actually that's where I fall in
that line. Do you think you think he's kind of
like the shadow of Satan character? Yeah, yeah, I think so.
I think he's Satan's furry agent on Earth. All right. So,
(10:57):
I think what this data is bareing out or are
bearing is that when it comes to cold, hard calculation
about the physical world around us, we're not always engaging
in critical objective thought. And this is when perception can
falter exactly, and it falters along lines that have nothing
(11:18):
to do with you know, skunk gates and devils. Uh.
The Chapman survey here also found that the majority of
majority of Americans not only actively fear crimes like child abduction,
gang violence, sexual assault, and an other sort of you know,
often sensationalized crimes of this this nature, they also believe
these crimes had increased over the past twenty years. Now.
(11:41):
This is particularly interesting when you look at statistical data
from police and FBI records that actually showed that crime
has decreased in America over the past two decades. The
fact that that often often gets criminologists in trouble when
they when they start pointing these these facts out when
they say, I mean that the crime rate has actually
gone down, no matter what it feels like. And certainly
(12:04):
you know if you if you, if your life has
been touched by by violent crime of one type or another,
that that that those those statistics are going to seem
less reliable. But likewise, what you have, what if your
life hasn't been directly touched by this violence, but you
simply are privy to it on a daily basis through
your consumption of media. Well, and I think what colors
(12:26):
this perception to that violence has gone up is that
you often hear the that the United States, of all
the developed countries, has one of the highest homicide rates.
And then if you look at an FBI two thousand
and eleven statistic of the more than twelve thousand homicides,
you'll see that seventy of them were caused by firearms.
(12:47):
It was homicide by firearms. So it kind of there's
there's a there's an actual support of real threat there.
But then there's the overall statistics which would tell you
on a day to day basis us that crime has
actually decreased. So it gets kind of sticky with this,
especially when you bring firearms into the equation. And if
(13:10):
you guys are interested in that, um, we encourage you
to check out the article from The Atlantic. It's called
quote gun Violence in America, the thirteen key questions with
thirteen concercise answers. It's by Jonathan Straight And that'll give
you a bit more information on the gun factor, which
is very nuanced, complex and more than we can bite
(13:33):
off in this particular episode. Yeah, and I'll include a
link to that article on the landing page for this
episode is stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Alright. So,
some of the other contributing factors to perceived fear, according
to the Chapman University survey, is that people with lower
levels of education will exhibit significantly higher levels of fear
(13:56):
regarding a bunch of stuff like personal safety, their future,
running out of money, getting sick, Internet usage again, identity, theft,
criminal victimization, government, the fear of government being oppressive, and
so on and so forth, immigration, natural disasters, and man
made disasters. And they found that watching television talk shows
(14:20):
in particular UH with a high frequency was strongly related
to fear, and not surprisingly, a studied diet of two
crime true crime TV shows affects level of fear and individuals.
And they have just more and more data on this.
If you want to check it out, The actually break
down fear factors into gender, political affiliation, race, and so
(14:41):
on and so forth. So if you want to see
more about that, definitely check out the University of Chapman's
Fear Survey of Americans. And the reason we we brought
out all of this data for you guys is that
we felt like it was a good basis to explore
the overall concept of mean world syndrome. Yes, mean world syndrome,
(15:01):
which stems from cultivation theory. Now, cultivation theory is a
social theory developed by George Gebner, who we mentioned earlier
and Larry Gross from the University of Pennsylvania in the
mid nineties sixties, and it examines the long term effects
of television. So in essence, the idea here is that
TV is cultivating our culture. UH think of you know,
(15:23):
Shepherd Fairies, Obey graff d. I think of John Carpenter
as they live with the the the the the the
glasses that reveal what television is really informing onto the
minds of the public um. And you have a pretty
good idea about what's going on here. The TV is
feeding your brain. It's informing our minds, both explicitly and
implicitly on who and what we are, what sort of
(15:45):
world we live in. So it's cultivating the viewers conceptions
of social reality. Now, Groner and Gross study television programming
for twenty two years, and each year they randomly selected
a week in real hoarded prime time programming as well
as children's weekend programming, and they identify the quantity of
(16:06):
violence and programs, and they found them to be pretty
stable overtime. For instance, dramas that feature violence averaged five
violent acts per viewing hour. However, they found some inequalities
in victimhood, with older people, women, and minorities particularly at
risk in these acts of violence. So even though minorities
(16:28):
were underrepresented on television, when they did appear, they were
much more likely to be victims of violence. Now, to
analyze the effects of the violence on the minds of
the participants of Governor and Gross correlated the data from
the content analysis of television were survey data from people
who were classified based on the amount of time they
spent watching TV. So of course you've got two groups here,
(16:49):
heavy watchers of TV four plus hours and light watchers
less than two hours. And using a survey he targeted
four attitudes. So the first one was chances of involvement
with violence. So what they found is that light viewers
predicted their weekly odds of being involved in violence or
something like one in one hundred, while heavy viewers said
(17:10):
it was more like one in ten. Then the second
attitude was fear of walking alone at night. Women were
more afraid than men, but both sexes who were heavy
viewers overestimated criminal activity, believing it to be ten times
more than figures actually indicate. The third was perceived activity
(17:31):
of police. Heavy viewers believe that about five percent of
societies involved with law enforcement, and in comparison, the light
viewers thought it looks like one which is about right
and general mistrust of people. That's the fourth attitude. People
who were heavy viewers tended to see other people's actions
and motives more negatively. And if you drill down a
(17:54):
little bit further into griner and grasses work, you'll find
that they were looking at these very specific behaviors emerging,
and they define them as mainstreaming, which is the process
by which heavy viewing of television resulted in the similarity
of perspective among viewers. And it didn't matter what they're
(18:16):
their socio economic class was, or their education, those who
were heavy TV viewers had this perspective. They all shared
that there's a sort of mainstreaming of what they thought
was going on. And then something called resonance, which was
that if someone had a real life violent incident that
(18:36):
happened to them, well, that was amplifying their experience and
making it feel like it was more prevalent. And certainly
the yeah, the resonance residence makes perfect sense. You have
something like this, it touches your real life. It's going
to completely color your perception of reality, even and even
the even the news that you happen to catch on
(18:56):
in the evening. Yeah, because you could in effect be
experiencing that over and over again via these different situations,
whether it's a report on the news or it's um
some sort of c s i UH scenario. But the
thing about this mean world syndrome is that it is
not just about violence, it actually extends out further into
(19:19):
the world. It's tendrils go a bit more into the
social fabric. Indeed, yeah, I mean it's not television is
not a media or not only cultivating our ideas about
about what's going on in the world. They're cultivating our
ideas about what what the human species is, what what
our bodies should look like. Um. There's a two thousand
three paper that was published in the Journal of Youth
(19:41):
and Adolescence titled the Effect of thin ideal television commercials
on Body dissatisfaction and schema activation during early adolescence. So,
in this study, they presented two groups of girls with
different sets of ads. One set had undernourished women in
it and the other set did not. They exposed both
(20:01):
groups of girls to these ads and the results the
girls who saw the ads with the emaciated models experienced
immediate episodes of insecurity and distress about their weight. What's more,
two years later, the same girls still reported greater dissatisfaction
with their bodies as compared to the other group of
girls who didn't have to witness the emaciated models in
(20:24):
the commercials. So the idea here is the continued exposure
to unrealistic body types in the in the media affected
the girls perceptions about what a normal, healthy, human female
body looks like. Again, the media is cultivating our understanding
of reality, and in this case, it's cultivating our ideas
about what your body should look like. That's fascinating to me.
(20:45):
So over a number of years, this database gets built
up in your mind about what is normal, when in fact,
if you look at the normal statistics for proportions and women,
it's nothing like what is represented in media. Yeah, so
it's it's it's not not only the outer world that
is that is skewed, but it's also the inner world.
It's both looking out and looking inward. Uh, you end
(21:07):
up with unrealistic expectations about what's gonna happen. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break. When we get back,
we are going to talk more about the lovers that
we're pulling here with this meanworld syndrome. Alright, we're back. Um.
(21:28):
You know, in all of this, I kept thinking about
the television series Sons of Anarchy, which I think I
mentioned previously. Just in the space of a month sort
of been want bench watched the entire run of the
show like seven series seasons of it, and the whole time,
I was just really struck by how violent the show is.
And I'm I'm kind of I'm used to violent shows,
(21:50):
but I think the based on some some online staff,
I was looking at the members of the biker gang
in this series kill a hundred and fifty three people
in the main care Jack's teller, who you're supposed to
be the most sympathetic towards throughout the show, kills forty
six people here in the course of the show, like
every episode has some sort of horrible, cold blooded murder
(22:11):
in it and uh, and so I just kept thinking, like,
what is this? What is this doing to me? You
know what? How is this affecting my awareness? And and
am I more afraid of Outlaw Motorcycle Club now than
I was in the past? I don't know. You know,
That's how I felt with Breaking Bad. Um. I love
that series, but it was really hard to watch and
it gave me the sense that the world is a rotten,
(22:33):
stinking thing. And that's why I like to watch you
Gaba Gabba. It's a lot more positive and uh, and
it's easier to binge watch the entire the entire run
of the show and it's got great music too, exactly. Um.
In terms of binge watching, uh, this is an interesting
area when especially talking about cultivation theory and mean world syndrome,
(22:56):
because I mean, binge watching has been around for a while,
but though not in name, uh, for a while, it's
been possible to get the entire run of a series
and just throw yourself into it. For a while, it's
been possible to go to the video Stongeres were in
a bunch of stuff and watch it before they can
lose yourself in in in a book, in a comic book,
what have you. But in recent years we've seen been
(23:18):
binge watching pushed as an acceptable and even uh preferable
model of media consumption. Netflix puts out you know, all
of the new season of the House of Cards and
you and you can just watch all of it, just
lose yourself in the show. Or Amazon Prime i think,
follows the same model with some of their shows that
(23:38):
have come out, which is really enjoyable. I have to
say I'm not slamming it, because it can be really
great to lose yourself in the show and just and
not have to wait after each cliffhanger On the other hand,
it's normalizing this sort of binge watching behavior that we
might not have all engaged in before. And if you've
got ten different series chewed up that you're binge watching,
that's a lot of consumption of these various world models.
(24:04):
And uh so it's, like I said, it's a new
area for the most part. So there hasn't been a
lot of research done on binge watching and what it's
doing to us. But there was a two thousand fifteen
studied by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin,
and they found that the more lonely and depressed you are,
the more likely you are to binge watch. They conducted
(24:25):
a survey on three hundred sixteen eighteen to twenty nine
year olds on how often they watched TV, how often
they had feelings of loneliness, depression, and self regulation deficiency,
and finally how often they binge watched television. They found
that the more lonely and depressed you are, the more
likely you are to binge watch television. And an attempt
(24:45):
to distance yourself from what's troubling you, you know, to
escape from your fears and escape from your anxieties. And
UH and simply become one with the fictional world. And
as with a lot of binge behavior, loneliness to press
and self regulation deficiency are all key factors here. So again,
you dived into the deep end of the TV pool
(25:06):
in order to forget what's bothering you. Now back to
the question though, is it harmful? Right? Because, as we said,
doesn't feel harmful when you're engaging in it. Um. This
is where the researchers from the University of Texas at
Austin argue that you have all these other factors that
are potentially setting in physical fatigue, higher propensity for obesity,
(25:26):
as well as other health concerns UH factor and potential
work neglect, potential relationship neglect, and you have a potentially
destructive cycle on your hands. Now, imagine that if all
you ever watched, you binge watched was true crime TV.
Okay a can you would have this sense that this
was a rotten, stinking world And and a follow up
(25:50):
of sorts to Gripner and Grosses true crime TV watching,
Glenn Sparks and Susan Helsing at Pretty University surveyed one
hundreds and three jury eligible adults about their TV watching habits.
They found that the heavy TV crime viewers estimated two
and a half times more real world deaths due to
(26:13):
murder than non viewers of this type of television. So
that that's a statistic that would really tell you that
the mindsets of people are being colored, particularly when they
are engaging in this type of TV, which over and
over again you see these terrible crime scenes, these crimes
(26:36):
that have been perpetuated against people, a lot of women. Um.
And then the other thing that they found again that
that that Gardner and Gross had found, was that heavy
true crime TV watchers misjudged the number of law enforcement
officers and attorneys in the total workforce. So lawyers, police
they each make up about less than one percent of workforce,
(26:58):
but those surveyed estimated it at more than six and
eight respectively. Yeah, because you end up just consuming, first
of all, some of the worst stories out there about
about what happens in the course of human life. And
then and then just my this focusing on all the
details of the criminal investigation, and many times they're going
(27:20):
to be a high profile case that's covered in these
shows too, where it's going to have an unrealistic portrayal
of how many people show up at a crime scene,
what kind of resources are leveled. It's it's solving it. Yeah,
and Sparks and Helsing also found that the True crime
TV watchers were also more likely to be fearful about
walking alone in a city at night. Of course, right
you're watching True crime TV, um and it reminds me
(27:43):
of the episode we did about phobias, and we were
talking about spiders, and if I'm recalling this correctly, in
one of the experiments, those people who were identified as
having serious phobias about spiders were asked to draw the
spiders and try to figure out the dimensions. And what
(28:05):
they found in those people with the really high phobias
of spiders is that their dimensions were huge. They were
largely outsized compared to the actual realistic dimensions of the spider.
But those who didn't have the phobia had the more
or less correct dimensions of the spider. And I think
about this. I think this is like the spider in
(28:25):
the brain of fear just expanding out in people who
are on a steady diet of this type of TV. Yeah. Yeah,
you end up in a situation where you think, every
time I step out the door, I'm potentially going to
be assaulted or thrown into a van, uh, targeted by
a serial murder, etcetera. Well, especially if you are enfolded
in social media right because you earned them being served
(28:48):
up even more and more stories of what's going on
in culture, um when it has to do with crime. Yeah,
I mean, just think about your you know, your own
interaction with social media and and crime. I mean, what
happens when you hear gunshots in your neighborhood. If you
ever have to to hear that, you're likely to what
head over to the neighborhood association Facebook group and uh
(29:09):
and see what everyone else is thinking. Did someone call
it in? What is someone that you know? Where? Does
someone think it occurred? That sort of thing? And then
in the case of larger, large scale violent to acts,
you know, acts of terrorism or what have you, you know,
you end up heading like over to Twitter, see what's
the you know, the current like breaking news about it, because,
as we've seen, we often see accounts of traumatic events
(29:34):
like this really breaking out on Twitter in real time
right at the cutting edge of the story, often the
unverified cutting edge of the story, where there hasn't been
enough time to validate all the information coming in. So
we have this huge ability to to live right there
at the threshold of what's going on. Uh, to binge
(29:55):
on the chaos, the disturbing details at times, the compassion,
but also that the hate that spirals out across the
social media following an occurrence like that, right, and what
you're seeing there in those instances, this um was accretion
really of social media and the responses is a kind
of emotional contagion. And we've talked about this before, this
(30:18):
idea that that anxiety is spreading throughout a network. And Uh,
if only we had some sort of experiments, say a
Facebook experiment we could point to and which they actually
changed the algorithm and manipulated the feeds for people so
that people either saw overwhelmingly positive stories and their newspeeds
(30:42):
or overwhelmingly negative stories. Ah. Yes, we do have that data. Yeah,
and this is great because there they're toying with the
way that the media, in the form of Facebook can
cultivate the users. Yeah, we're talking about In June of
last year, Facebook did conduct an emotional contagion experiment on
(31:03):
almost seven hundred thousand users, and they did, in fact
manipulate their their news feeds, and what they saw is
that those people producing fewer upbeating more negative expressions correlated
with the negative stories that were in their news speed.
And the reverse also held true, and researchers produced the
number of negative posts visible. So you see this mean
(31:27):
world syndrome at play really in the responses of the users.
And of course this drew a lot of ire from
people because they felt like they were being manipulated. They
felt like Facebook was being shady. Uh, and perhaps they were,
but I will say that you have more than eight
hundred million people logging in every day. UM, that's usable
(31:52):
scientific research, and so you can understand why Facebook and
why scientists social scientists aren't interested in trying to dip
into it, although their methods maybe we're less than desirable. Yeah,
it's it's interesting though, how like the main headline for
that story ended up being Facebook is experimenting on you
without your knowledge, tying directly into some of those fears
(32:14):
and worries we were talking about at the top of
the podcast, the fear that that's so corporate and or
government entity is is looking over your shoulder, manipulating something
in your life. Um, as opposed to the ultimately the
more disturbing idea of just how to what degree we
are cultivated with to what degree our worldview in our
(32:34):
minds and even our self reflection are cultivated by these, uh,
these fonts of media. So my question here is, do
you think at some point will become savvy enough that
we understand that mean world syndrome is at play and
things will equal out? In other words, uh, perceived threat
versus real threat come a little bit closer to each other.
I would hope. So, I mean that would certainly, I
(32:56):
would hope. So it's it's not very encouraging given that
this that cultivation theory has been around so long, you know,
and it's there's not like a cultivation theory awareness button
flashing in the corner of your screen when you've been
on the same channel for too long or anything of
that nature. Because I mean, also, it's kind of like, uh,
it's kind of like preparing a bath, right, the media
(33:16):
prepares a bath for you. They decide how much hot
water goes in, how much cold water, and then you
get into it and it feels all right, and you
don't question it. You never stop to think, should I
be bathing in a potter water or a colder bath. Well,
especially with this medium, with TV, which has been around
and kind of was stable for a long time, and
then other types of media came on board, and then
(33:38):
all of a sudden your access to information into fiction
and nonfiction um exploded. So it is an interesting time
right now. It will be interesting to see ten years
from now what sort of studies come out of it. Yeah,
because I mean right now, especially with Facebook, And I
think I mentioned this a bit in the some of
the race episodes we're talking about, Like if you have
(33:59):
kind of an an extreme opinion about anything, be at
race related or not purely political, what what have you? Uh,
you can find a place on Facebook, in social media,
you can find a blog, You can find somewhere that
will completely cultivate those ideas that you have. They won't
question them, won't challenge you, and you can just you
can use your retreat into that that particular abyss. And
(34:23):
that's one of the strengths of social media and the
Internet age. But it's uh, it's undeniably a weakness. Well,
I think it appropriate to read a quote from George Girpner,
who back in the day said, quote, our studies have
shown that growing up from infancy with this unprecedented diet
of TV violence has three consequences, which in combination I
call the mean world syndrome. What this means is that
(34:45):
if you are growing up in a home where there
is more than say, three hours of television per day
for all practical purposes, you live in a meaner world
and act accordingly. Then your next door neighbor who lives
in the same world but watches the US television the
programming reinforces the worst fears and apprehensions and paranoia of people. There.
(35:08):
You have it all right? Well, if hey, you want
to check out more episodes of the podcast, you want
to check out the landing page for this uh this
particular episode with the links out to related content and
outside content. Head on over to stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. And if you have thoughts on the
mean World syndrome or anything else, please do share those
thoughts with us. You can do so by sending us
(35:29):
an email at below the mind at how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.