Film Censorship and Controversy 1 of 3

© British Film Institute

Ten things wrong with the ‘effects model’

The following points summarise David Gauntlett’s arguments about the ‘effects model’:

The effects model tackles social problems ‘backwards’.

To understand the causes of violence, or other human behaviour, research should logically

begin with the people who engage in those actions. Media effects researchers, however,

begin with the idea that the media is to blame, and then try to make links from the product

back to the world of actual violence.

The effects model treats children as inadequate.

Much of the discourse about children and the media positions children as potential victims,

and as little else. Furthermore, media effects research usually employs methods which will

not allow children to challenge this assumption. The hundreds of shallow quantitative studies,

often conducted by ‘psychologists’, have often been little more than traps for their subjects.

Assumptions within the effects model are characterised by barely concealed

conservative ideology.

Media effects research is good news for conservatives and right-wing ‘moralists’.

Conservatives have traditionally liked to blame popular culture for the ailments of society, not

only because they fear new and innovative forms of media, but also because it allows them to

divert attention away from other and, for them, more awkward social questions such as levels

of welfare provision.

The effects model inadequately defines its own objects of study.

Media effects studies are usually extremely undiscriminating about how they identify worrying

bits of media content, or subsequent behaviour by viewers. An act of ‘violence’, for example,

might be smashing cages to set animals free or using force to disable a nuclear-armed plane.

In many studies, ‘verbal aggression’ is included as a form of aggression. Once processed by

effects research, all of these various depictions or actions simply emerge as a ‘level of

aggression’.

The effects model is often based on artificial studies.

Since careful sociological studies of media influences require considerable amounts of time

and money, they are heavily outnumbered by simpler studies which often put their subjects

into artificial and contrived situations (but then are presented as studies of real situations). In

these settings the behaviour of children towards an inanimate object is often taken to

represent how they would behave towards a real person.

Film Censorship and Controversy 2 of 3

© British Film Institute

The effects model is often based on studies with misapplied methodology.

Studies which do not rely on the experimental method (such as longitudinal studies, in which

a group is assessed over a period of time) often fall down by wrongly applying methodological

procedure or by drawing inappropriate conclusions from particular methods. This means, for

example, applying different measures of TV viewing and levels of aggression at different

times, or ignoring the importance of biological, developmental and environmental factors.

Correlation studies may leap to causal conclusions without proof – there is a logical

coherence to the idea that children whose behaviour is antisocial and disruptive will also have

a greater interest in the more violent and noisy television programmes, whereas the idea that

their behaviour is a consequence of these programmes lacks both rational consistency and

empirical support.

The effects model is selective in its criticisms of media depictions of violence.

Effects studies may involve distinctly ideological interpretations of what constitutes ‘antisocial’

action and tend only to refer to fictional TV programmes and films rather than news and

factual programming. There is a substantial problem with an approach which suggests that

on-screen violence is bad if it does not extend this to cover news and factual violence, which

is often cruel and has no visible consequences for the perpetrator.

The effects model assumes superiority to the ‘masses’.

While the researchers consider that other people might be affected by media content, they

assume that their own approach is objective and that the media will have no effect on them.

Surveys show that almost everybody feels this way: whilst varying percentages of the

population say they are concerned about media effects on others, almost nobody says they

have been affected themselves. Some researchers excuse this approach by saying that their

concerns lie with children, but in cases where this is not possible, because young adults have

been used in the study we find the invocation of the ‘Other’, the undiscriminating ‘heavy

viewer’, the ‘uneducated’, the working class as the victim of ‘effects’.

The effects model makes no attempt to understand meanings of the media.

The effects model rests on a base of reductive assumptions about, and unjustified

stereotypes of, media content. To assert that ‘media violence’ will bring about negative

consequences is not only to presume that depictions of violence in the media always promote

antisocial behaviour, and that such a category actually exists and makes sense, but it also

assumes that whatever medium is being studied by the researchers holds a singular message

which will be carried unproblematically to the audience. In-depth qualitative studies have

given strong support to the view that media audiences routinely arrive at their own, often

heterogeneous, interpretations of everyday media texts.

Film Censorship and Controversy 3 of 3

© British Film Institute

The effects model is not grounded in theory.

How does seeing an action depicted by the media translate into a motive which actually

prompts an individual to behave in the same way? The lack of convincing explanations (let

alone anything which we could call a ‘theory’) of how this process might occur is perhaps the

most important and worrying problem with effects research. The idea that violence is

‘glamorised’ in some films and TV shows sometimes seems relevant; however, the more

horrifyingly violent a production is, the less the violence tends to be glamorised. Even in the

case of The Matrix (Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski, USA, 1999), in which serious

violence looks rather stylish, there is no good explanation of why anyone would simply copy

those actions; and we do need an explanation if the effects hypothesis is to rise above the

status of ‘not very convincing suggestion’.

(Summarised from: D Gauntlett, 2001, ‘The Worrying Influence of “Media Effects” Studies’ in

M Barker and J Petley (eds), Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate, Routledge.)