Living With Television: The Violence Profile

Living With Television: The Violence Profile by George Gerbner and Larry Gross

Introduction

The study examines whether TV entertainment incites or pacifies viewers.
It uses Cultural Indicators as a framework for a long-range study of trends in television content and effects.
The environment of symbols sustains human existence, where we learn, share, and act upon meanings.
Religion was the first and longest-lasting organization of the symbolic world, encompassing art, science, technology, statecraft, and public story-telling.
Common rituals and mythologies are agencies of symbolic socialization and control, dramatizing societal norms and values.
This system of messages cultivates prevailing outlooks (culture) and regulates social relationships, making the established social order seem real, normal, and right.
Institutional processes producing these message systems have become professionalized, industrialized, centralized, and specialized, shifting from handicraft to mass production and from traditional religion and formal education to the mass media, particularly television.
New technologies may offer more choices, but television provides a simultaneous public experience of a common symbolic environment, binding diverse communities.
Television is likely to remain the chief source of repetitive and ritualized symbol systems, cultivating a common consciousness among far-flung and heterogeneous mass publics.

Long-Range Study of the Symbolic Environment

The study includes the annual Violence Index and Profile of TV content and its correlation with viewers’ conceptions of social reality.
Research began in 1967-68 with the investigation of violence in network television drama for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.
Continued through 1972 under the sponsorship of the Surgeon General’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior.
Both reports showed the role and symbolic functions, as well as the extent, of violence in television drama.
In 1972, a conference recommended broadening the Violence Index to include social relationships and viewer conceptions.
The Violence Profile (fifth in the series) included violence-victim ratios and viewer responses.
Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare reported that the research was broadened to encompass additional dimensions and linked with viewers’ perceptions of violence and its effects.

Cultural Indicators Project

Periodic study of television programming and the conceptions of social reality that viewing cultivates in child and adult audiences.
The study of violence is a continuing aspect of the research.
The project is also developing indicators of other themes, roles, and relationships significant for social science and policy.
Television is essentially different from other media, requiring a new approach to research.
This article outlines a critique of research modes derived from experience with other media and advances an approach more appropriate to television’s characteristics and functions.
It presents the latest Violence Profile (No. 7 in the series), including indicators of some conceptions television cultivates in its viewers.

Inappropriate Conceptions of the Problem

Television research is often based on inappropriate conceptions of the problem.
Early approaches viewed television as just another mass communication technology, applying research methods rooted in experience with other media.
These earlier studies focused on attitude or behavior change, assumptions that are largely inadequate for investigating the effects of television.

Television as a Central Cultural Force

Television is the central cultural arm of American society, serving primarily to extend and maintain conventional conceptions, beliefs, and behaviors.
Its chief cultural function is to spread and stabilize social patterns, cultivating resistance to change.
Television is a medium of socialization into standardized roles and behaviors, functioning as enculturation.
The substance of consciousness cultivated by TV includes basic assumptions about the “facts” of life and standards of judgment.
The Cultural Indicators project aims to identify and track these premises and the conclusions they cultivate across TV’s diverse publics.
Television should be studied as a force for enculturation rather than as a selectively used medium of separate “entertainment” and “information” functions.
The differences between television and other media are more crucial than the similarities.
Traditional research designs are inadequate for the study of television effects, necessitating more appropriate methods.
Studies indicate that “living” in the world of television cultivates conceptions of its own conventionalized “reality.”

Unique Aspects of Television

Reach, scope, ritualization, organic connectedness, and non-selective use of mainstream television differentiate it from other media.
TV penetrates every home, offering seasonal, cyclical, and perpetual patterns of fact and fiction, all woven into an entertainment fabric that produces consumers for advertisers.
It encompasses essential elements of art, science, technology, statecraft, and public story-telling.
The information-poor (children and less educated adults) are the entertainment-rich, held in thrall by the myths and legends of a new electronic priesthood.
Those born before 1950 may find it difficult to comprehend television’s transformations, as it came into their lives after their formative years.
Unlike print, television does not require literacy. Unlike movies, it is “free” and always running. Unlike radio, it can show as well as tell. Unlike theater, concerts, movies, and churches, it does not require mobility.
Television has virtually unlimited access from cradle to grave, preceding reading and increasingly preempting it.
Television is the first centralized cultural influence to permeate both the initial and final years of life.

Socially Constructed Reality

All societies explain the world to themselves and their children, constructing a “reality” that gives a coherent picture of what exists, what is important, what is related to what, and what is right.
The constant cultivation of such “realities” is the task of mainstream rituals and mythologies, which legitimize action along socially functional and conventionally acceptable lines.
Modern industrial society has created a system in which few communities can maintain independent integrity, making us parts of a Leviathan whose nervous system is telecommunications.
Publicly shared knowledge of the “wide world” is transmitted through this nervous system.
Television is the chief common ground among different groups in a large, heterogeneous national community.

Television's Influence

No national achievement, celebration, or mourning seems real until it is confirmed and shared on television.
Never before have all classes and groups shared so much of the same culture and perspectives while having so little to do with their creation.
Representation in the world of television gives an idea, a cause, a group its sense of public identity, importance, and relevance.
No movement can get going without some visibility in that world or long withstand television’s power to discredit, insulate, or undercut.
Other media cultivate partial and parochial outlooks, while television spreads the same images and messages to all.
TV is the new (and only) culture of those who expose themselves to information only when it comes as “entertainment,” the most broadly effective educational fare in any culture.
All major networks depend on the same markets and programming formulas, leading to the non-selective use of television.
Individual tastes and program preferences are less important than the time a program is on.
The nearly universal, non-selective, and habitual use of television fits the ritualistic pattern of its programming.
You watch television as you might attend a church service, except that most people watch television more religiously.

Governance and Technology

Constitutional guarantees shield the prerogatives of ownership.
Technological imperatives of electronics have changed modern governance more than Constitutional amendments and court decisions.
Television rivals ancient religions as a purveyor of organic patterns of symbols—news and other entertainment—that animate senses of reality and value.

Questioning Common Arguments

These considerations led to questioning many common arguments about television’s effects.
Concerns over violence on television often reflect fears of subversion, corruption, and unrest among lower classes being encouraged to imitate their “betters.”
Once the industrial order has legitimized its rule, the primary function of its cultural arm becomes the reiteration of that legitimacy and the maintenance of established authority.
Dramatic stories of symbolic violations demonstrate the rules of the games and the morality of its goals.
The system cultivates uniform assumptions, exploitable fears, acquiescence to power, and resistance to meaningful change.
The critical correlate of television violence is not only the stimulation of occasional individual aggression.
Living in a symbolic world ruled by violence has far-reaching consequences, preparing for large-scale organized violence by cultivating fear and acquiescence to power.
TV violence demonstrates power, communicating social norms, relationships, goals, means, winners and losers, and the risks of life.
Fear, rather than aggression, may be a more critical residue of violence, leading to expectation of violence or passivity in the face of injustice.

Realism of TV Fiction

The realism of TV fiction hides its synthetic and functionally selective nature.
Viewers assume that television plots take place against a backdrop of the real world, offering a continuous stream of “facts” and impressions about life.
The premise of realism is a Trojan horse carrying a selective, synthetic, and purposeful image of life.
Viewers suspend their disbelief in the reality of the symbolic world to varying degrees.

Incidental Knowledge

Even the most sophisticated viewers derive knowledge of the real world from fictional representation.
Background information in television is often seen as “realistic.”
Viewers may not be keenly aware of distortions, such as the overrepresentation of men compared to women or the underrepresentation of real-life causes of injury and death.
Much of what we know about diverse spheres of activity comes from fictional worlds.
Viewers may derive a wealth of incidental “knowledge” from television drama.
Television provides persuasive imagery, offering clarity and resolution unlike the ambiguities of real life.
Problems are never left hanging, rewards and punishments are present and accounted for, and the rules of the game are known and rarely change.
Television “shows” us the workings of important institutions and the people who fill important roles.
Television provides a common background of assumptions about what things are and how they work.
The world of television drama is a mixture of truth and falsehood, an extension of standardized images taught since childhood.
The audience is primarily middle-class citizens who believe in democracy, a free economy, and a white, male God.

Implications for Research

The implications for research are far-reaching and call into question essential aspects of the research paradigm stemming from historic pressures for behavior manipulation and marketing efficacy.
They suggest a model based on broad enculturation rather than narrow changes in opinion or behavior.
We need to know what types of common consciousness whole systems of messages might cultivate.
To answer such questions, some conventional articles of faith about research strategy should be reviewed and revised.
Consequences cannot be presumed without prior investigation of content, nor can content be limited to isolated elements or individual viewer selections.
The “world” of television is an organic system of stories and images, and only system-wide analysis of messages can reveal the symbolic world that structures common assumptions.
The system as a whole plays a major role in setting the agenda of issues and shaping the most pervasive norms and perspectives of society.

Experimental Research

Another conventional research assumption is that the experiment is the most powerful method, and that change is the most significant outcome to measure.
However, when television is the subject, stability may be the significant outcome of the sum total of the play of many variables.
It is impossible to find unexposed groups identical to viewers or to isolate television from the mainstream of modern culture.
The primary social function of television is to maintain, reinforce, and exploit rather than undermine or alter conventional conceptions.
Isolated campaigns may be ineffective due to the power of mainstream communications.
TV cultivates conceptions that are not easily distinguishable from those of other major entertainment media.
TV’s influence comes from its ability to streamline, amplify, ritualize, and spread conventional capsules of mass-produced information and entertainment.
Experimental tests of the consequences of exposure to one particular type of television programming are inappropriate.
The world of TV drama consists of a complex system of characters, events, actions, and relationships, whose effects cannot be measured with regard to any single element or program seen in isolation.

Conceptualizing and Studying Television Effects

The key to understanding the effects of television rests in a search for those assumptions about the “facts” of life and society that television cultivates in its more faithful viewers.
That search requires two different methods of research.

Message System Analysis

Periodic analysis of large and representative aggregates of television output as the system of messages to which total communities are exposed.
The purpose is to establish the composition and structure of the symbolic world.
Analysis begins with dramatic programs that populate and animate the heartland of the symbolic world.
Message system analysis maps its geography, demography, thematic and action structure, time and space dimensions, personality profiles, occupations, and fates.
It yields the terms of location, action, and characterization discharged into the mainstream of community consciousness.
Aggregate viewer interpretation and response starts with these common terms of basic exposure.

Cultivation Analysis

Determines what viewers absorb from living in the world of television.
Inquires into the assumptions television cultivates about the facts, norms, and values of society.
Turns the findings of message system analysis about the fantasy land of television into questions about social reality.
Each question has a “television answer” and an alternative answer closer to the observable world.
These questions are asked of samples of adults and children.
All responses are related to television exposure, other media habits, and demographic characteristics.
The response of light and heavy viewers is compared, controlling for sex, age, education, and other characteristics.
The “cultivation differential” indicates conceptions about social reality that viewing tends to cultivate.
Analysis looks at the contribution of TV drama to viewer conceptions in conjunction with other sources of knowledge, such as education and news.
The analysis is intended to illuminate the complementary and divergent roles of these sources in cultivating assumptions about reality.

General Features of the World of Network Television Drama

Television presents a selective and functional system of messages, where time, space, and motion follow laws of dramatic convention and social utility.
People are created to depict social types, causes, powers, and fates.
Economics and the requirement of wide acceptability assure adherence to common notions of justice, clear-cut characterizations, tested plot lines, and proven formulas.
Representation signifies social existence; absence means symbolic annihilation.
Being buffeted by events denotes social impotence; ability to wrest events is a mark of social power.
Values and forces come into play through characterizations.
Plots weave causality into dramatic ritual, confirming preferred notions of what’s what, who’s who, and who counts for what.
The action is typically a game of social typing, group identification, skill, and power.
The dramatic pattern defines situations and cultivates premises about society, people, and issues.
Casting the symbolic world has its own meaning: representation goes to the types that dominate the social order.
About three-quarters of leading characters are male, American, middle- and upper-class, and in the prime of life.

Character Representation

Women typically represent romantic or family interest.
Males can act in nearly any role, but female parts often involve the suggestion of sex.
Only one in three male leads is shown as intending to marry, while two of every three females are married or expect to marry.
Female “specialties” limit the proportion of TV’s women.
Nearly half of all females are concentrated in the most sexually eligible young adult population.
Children, adolescents, and old people together account for less than 15 percent of the total fictional population.
Approximately five in ten characters are gainfully employed, with three as proprietors, managers, and professionals.
The fourth comes from the ranks of labor, and the fifth serves to enforce the law.

Types of Activity

Six in ten characters are engaged in discernible occupational activity, roughly divided into three groups:
- Legitimate private business.
- Art, science, religion, health, education, and welfare.
- Forces of official authority and criminals.
One in every four leading characters acts out a drama of transgression and its suppression.

Violence in Television

Violence plays a key role, demonstrating the rules of the game of power.
In real life, violence is subtle and circumstantial, but in the symbolic world, overt physical motion makes visible what is usually hidden.
Symbolic violence does the job of real violence more cheaply and entertainingly.
Half of all characters are free to engage in violence, with one-fifth “specializing” in violence.
Violence rarely stems from close personal relationships but is between strangers.
Violence is often a specialty, testing the norms of and settling challenges to the existing power structure.

The Violence Profile

A set of indicators tracing aspects of the television world and conceptions of social reality they tend to cultivate in the minds of viewers.
Four specific types of indicators have been developed:
- Programming trends.
- Specific measures of violence combined in the Violence Index.
- Structural characteristics of the dramatic world, such as “risk ratios.”
- The “cultivation differential.”

Message System Analysis Procedures

Message system analysis has been performed on annual sample-weeks of prime time and weekend daytime network dramatic programming since 1967.
Violence is defined as “the overt expression of physical force against self or other, compelling action against one’s will on pain of being hurt or killed, or actually hurting or killing.”
Observations are recorded in three types of units: the program, each specific violent action, and each dramatic character.
“Program” means a single fictional story presented in dramatic form.
Violent action means a scene of some violence confined to the same parties.
Characters analyzed are of two types: major and minor.

Sampling of Programming

Network dramatic programs transmitted in evening prime time (8 p.m. to 11 p.m.) and network children’s dramatic programs transmitted weekend mornings (Saturday and Sunday between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m.) comprise the analytical source material.

Coder Training and Reliability

A staff of 12 to 18 coders is recruited and trained for the analysis of each program sample.
Coders work in independent pairs and monitor their assigned videotaped programs.
All programs are coded by two separate coder-pairs to provide double-coded data for reliability comparisons.

Violence Measures

Three sets of violence measures have been computed from the observational data:
- Percent of programs with any violence (prevalence).
- Frequency and rate of violent episodes (rate).
- Number of roles calling for characterizations as violents, victims, or both (role).
These measures are combined to form the Violence Index.
$Violence Index = Prevalence + 2(Rate) + Roles$

Program Mix

“Action” programs contribute most violence, comprising more than half of all prime-time and weekend daytime programming.
While general crime and adventure plays dropped in 1975, cartoon crime and adventure rose.
There has been no significant reduction in the overall Violence Index.
A “family hour” decline has been matched by an increase in violence during children’s programming and after 9 p.m. EST.
Late evening violence shot up on all three networks.
Children’s programs became more violent on ABC and NBC.
The Violence Index shows long-term stability and similarity among networks.
The “family hour” Violence Index shows little change for ABC and NBC but substantial reduction for CBS.

Network Programmer Actions

The indicators reflect what network programmers actually do compared to what they say or intend to do.
Network policy seems to have responded in narrow terms to very specific pressure.
Eight out of every ten programs, and nine out of ten-weekend children’s hour programs, still contain some violence.
The overall rate of violent episodes is higher than at any time since 1969.
Six to seven out of every ten leading characters are involved in some violence.
Between one and two out of every ten are involved in killing.
Reductions have been achieved in the portrayal of on-screen killers and in “family hour” violence, but a rise in late evening and general children’s violence has canceled out any overall gains.

Sociocultural Forces

Deeply rooted sociocultural forces are at work, with symbolic violence demonstrating power and serving to reinforce and preserve the existing social order.
This maintenance mechanism seems to work through cultivating a sense of danger and a differential calculus of the risks of life in different groups.

Structural Characteristics of Television Drama

These reflect basic cultural assumptions that make a show “entertaining.”
The most elementary relationship is that of violent and victim, which provides a differential calculus of hazards and opportunities for different groups.
The character score is the roles component of the Violence Index.
The violent-victim and killer-killed ratios are obtained by dividing violents and victims within each group.
Totals from 1967-75 show 1.19 male and 1.32 female victims for every violent male and female.
There were nearly two male killers for every male killed, but for every female killer, one woman was killed.

Differential Risks

Old men, married men, lower class, foreign, and nonwhite males, were most likely to get killed rather than to inflict lethal injury.
“Good guys” were most likely to be the killers.
Young and old, unmarried, lower class, foreign, and nonwhite women bore heavy burdens of relative victimization.
Old, poor, and black women, were shown only as killed and never as killers.
“Good” women had no lethal power, but “bad” women were even more lethal than “bad” men.
The victimization of the “good” woman is often the curtain-raiser that provokes the hero to righteous “action.”
The pattern of relative victimization is remarkably stable, demonstrating a sense of risk and power.
Television viewing cultivates a general sense of danger and mistrust.

Cultivation Differential

Highlights differences in conception of relevant aspects of social reality that television viewing tends to cultivate in heavy viewers compared to light viewers.
Most appropriate to propositions in which television might cultivate conceptions that measurably deviate from those coming from other sources.
The independent contributions of television are most powerful in cultivating assumptions about which there is little opportunity to learn first-hand.

Heavy Viewing Patterns

Heavy viewing is part and parcel of a complex syndrome that also includes lower education, lower mobility, lower aspirations, and higher anxieties.
Viewing helps to hold together and cultivate elements of that syndrome.
Television viewing also makes a separate and independent contribution to the “biasing” of conceptions of social reality within most age, sex, educational, and other groupings.
The study proceeds by comparing responses of heavy and light viewers, with other characteristics held constant.

Survey Results

Adult survey results included in this report probe facts of life relating to law enforcement, trust, and a sense of danger.
Heavy viewers were always more likely to give the “television answer.”
“Can’t be too careful” was a common response to the question of trust, especially among those who don't read newspapers regularly, and women, indicating a higher level of mistrust.

Exaggerated Demand

An exaggerated impression of the actual number of law enforcement workers seems to be a consequence of viewing television, cultivating an exaggerated demand for their services.
Questions about feelings of trust and safety may be used to test that suggestion.
Living in the world of television seems to strengthen the conclusion that people cannot be trusted.

Violence Involvement Estimations

Patterns of overestimations in line with television’s view of the world may explain why estimates of danger in neighborhoods have little to do with crime statistics or personal experience.
Television and other media exposure may be as important as demographic and experiential factors in explaining how people view the world.
Television appears to condition the view of the generation that knew no world without it.
The “under 30” respondents exhibit consistently higher levels of “television responses,” despite being better educated.
Young people, women, and heavy viewers sense greater danger than light viewers.

Exploitation of Fear

Fear is a universal emotion and easy to exploit, making symbolic violence a cheap way to cultivate it effectively.
Ritualized displays of violence may cultivate exaggerated assumptions about threat and danger and lead to demands for protection.
A heightened sense of risk and insecurity is more likely to increase acquiescence to and dependence upon established authority than to threaten the social order.
Media-incited criminal violence may be a price industrial cultures extract from some citizens for the general pacification of most others.
Television appears to cultivate assumptions that fit its socially functional myths.
Television may function as the established religion of the industrial order, relating to governance as the church did to the state in earlier times.

Violence Measures Tables.

The following are key variables used for violence measures:
- N = Number of samples.
- %P = Programs containing violence.
- R/P = Rate per all programs.
- R/H = Rate per all hours.
- %V = Any involvement in Violence.
- %K = Any involvement in killing.
- PS = Program Score.
  $PS = %P+2(R/P)+2(R/H)$
- CS = character score.
  $CS=(%V)+(%K)$
- VI = Violence index.
  $VI = PS + CS$