Volume 41, Issue 2

Cultivation research argues that mean world beliefs are cultivated through media consumption. Our study expands this notion of cultivation research by integrating approaches from political psychology on conservatism and moral foundation theory, providing complementary explanations for mean world beliefs. Focusing on crime TV exposure and mean world beliefs, we expect both to be rooted in a conservative world view accentuated by the valuing of certain moral foundations. Participants ( N = 455) took part in a paper-pencil survey design to test three hypotheses regarding the interplay of conservatism, cultivation and mean world beliefs in the context of crime TV exposure. Results indicate evidence for both a significant relationship between conservative moral orientations and mean world beliefs and crime TV choice. Nevertheless, these relationships might suppress the influence of TV crime exposure. Implications for cultivation research are discussed.

Embedding a product or a brand into journalistic content may have a negative impact on how the content’s credibility is perceived by recipients. However, research has not been able to convincingly prove that product placement has an effect on how recipients perceive and evaluate media content. This particularly applies to context effects, such as the effect that the number of visible products or brands has on the perceived credibility of the journalistic content the placement is embedded in. This study addresses two questions: whether the use of visible products or brands embedded in journalistic content influences the credibility that recipients attribute to such content, and how the tenor of the content, positive or negative, interacts with the placed products. Based on experimental findings and real-time response measurements, we conclude that the number of visible products does not significantly affect the credibility attributed to journalistic content and that judgments about credibility are influenced by the interaction between the number of products placed and the tenor of the content.

This study investigated the effectiveness of narrative communication in the applied field of road safety education. A narrative message about the risks of road accidents was compared to a message without elements of storytelling but with a focus on road safety statistics. Novice drivers’ evaluation of risk connected to speeding was assessed as the target attitude. Transportation, facilitation of comprehension, and para-social interaction with protagonists were proposed as mediators of the persuasive message impact. Gender was examined as a moderator of the narrativity–attitude relationship. Results of a field experiment ( N = 125 driving school attendants) did not suggest the general superiority of narrative communication, but demonstrated a moderated indirect mediation: Transportation was found a relevant mediator of the narrativity–attitude relationship for female participants only. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

In cultivation research, differentiation is made between first- and second-order cultivation questions. However, their definition and relation remain unclear. This paper proposes a differentiation that focuses on the type of judgment underlying the respective cultivation questions. The former are frequency and probability judgments, while the latter are evaluative and address attitudes or values. Current theory in the field of cultivation research argues that these types of judgments are tied to on-line (second-order) and memory-based (first-order) processing. Based on psychological literature and a study on the cultivation of crime-related perceptions representative for the German population, we demonstrate that second-order judgments can also be built memory-based. Furthermore, we argue that the interrelation of first- and second-order judgments depends on whether judgments are built on-line or memory-based (especially in the case of second-order judgments). This may account for divergent empirical evidence in the field.