A Word of Caution for the Intelligent Consumer of Motion Pictures
Franklin Fearing
Franklin Fearing, professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles, is a member of the editorial board of the Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television. He is directing the research of graduate students in the fields of social psychology and the problems of human communication. During the summer of 1951 he conducted graduate courses at Columbia University, and spoke at the Consumer's Union Conference at Vassar College. The following article is based on the talk Dr. Fearing delivered at the conference. Both his address and one given at the same meeting by Dallas W. Smythe will be published in a forthcoming volume, Consumer Problems in a Period of International Tension, Consumer's Union of the United States.
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DALLAS W. SMYTHE has discussed in some detail the problems relating to the consumer's interest in television and radio sets and in programming. While I am assigned the topic of films, I think almost everything I have to say holds with equal force for radio and television. There are differences, but from the point of view of the social scientist, these are the mass media of communication, and the factors we are interested in are found in all of these media.
Dr. Smythe has implied that you are interested, as intelligent consumers, in better programs. I want to say something about some of the problems that come up in trying to decide what precisely we mean by the term "better programs" or "better films." I can't offer you any criteria so that you will know whether you are going to like the next movie that you go to see. The testing that researchers do in this area is quite different from the kind of testing that Consumer's Union does with respect to tomato juice or vacuum cleaners. It has a different implication. It is called effects analysis and is mainly concerned with the impact of films and radio programs on people. What effects, if any, do the contents of these programs have on human beings, on their attitudes, their beliefs, and more concretely
The answers to these questions so far as systematic research at present can answer them will not tell us directly the differences between "good" and "bad" films, nor will they give us anything in the nature of a list of the Best Buys, so familiar to Consumer's Union subscribers, in films and TV programs. I think we should be clear on one point. The questions with which we are here concerned can only be answered, even tentatively, by carefully designed research conducted by trained investigators. Social causation is always complex. A seemingly unimpeachable connection between stimulus A and social effect B may turn out to be only apparent. The armchair dicta of even the most intelligent and sophisticated observers can only give us hypotheses which carefully planned research may endeavor to test. This research is quite tedious and undramatic, but as the results accumulate, they may give us a basis for understanding the role, and hence a policy regarding the control of the great mass media of communication in our society.
Many people have strong feelings and beliefs about these problems. It is here that the professional and amateur viewers-with-alarm, good people all of them surely, tend to get high blood pressure. They witness a film, for example, which has a great deal of violence in it, or which depicts crime, or they listen to a radio program which is filled with violence, or crude slapstick, and vulgarity, or they watch Johnny listening, and they get dreadfully alarmed about the effects on Johnny. And the people who are more vocal in this matter tend to implement their alarm. They set up campaigns to do something about it. Currently a favorite target for such activities in many communities has been the comic strip. It is another mass medium of communication, and what I have to say will apply equally well to it. Periodically there is a wave of interest in the supposed evil effects of comic strips, and good people form committees to do something about them.
I am sure you are familiar with this kind of attitude, and probably most of us one time or another have shared this concern, and a feeling that something ought to be done. We don't like what we hear or see on radio or TV programs and we feel that their effects must be bad, that they are probably responsible for the increase in juvenile deliquency or the divorce
Back of these attitudes and activities are some interesting assumptions, assumptions which need careful analysis, and assumptions about which we need to have a considerable body of data before we are ready to organize a committee or try to pass a law or try to get the local police force on the job. Let us examine some of them.
The basic assumption seems to be that there is a simple causal connection between the content of a film or TV program and human behavior and attitudes. In other words, Johnny might become a delinquent or do something very, very bad after seeing a similar act on the TV screen.
The assumption that there is a simple relationship between the mass media and the behavior and attitudes and beliefs of human beings needs careful testing. It is here that we confront a paradoxical situation.
On the one hand, on general grounds, it seems that films, for example, have had a tremendous impact on human culture all over the world. It is almost trite to say that the content of films, as determined in a very small area in Los Angeles County, in one way or another has affected people all over the world, has changed their interests, habits, and even moral standards. If it is true that films can have such far-reaching effects, surely they could also cause Johnny to become a drug addict or to commit a crime, or, at the very least, put wrong ideas in his head.
On the other hand—and here is the seeming paradox that I want to explore with you this evening—research, conducted as carefully as we now know how to conduct it, reveals that the effects of these media— films and radio, especially films—on human attitudes and behavior is unexpectedly slight.
I want to proceed cautiously here because I am very conscious of the difficulties of conducting rigorous research in this area. It may be that our inability to demonstrate clear-cut effects of films or radio means that our methods of investigation need to be sharpened, and that with better procedures we might find more effects than now appear to be the case. This important qualification underlies all that I have to say.
Let us look at some of these researches. I think they might interest you from the point of view of their methods as well as their results. Perhaps the most elaborate study of the impact of films on human beings yet
There were two types of films. One group was called "nuts and bolts" films, and the other "orientation" films. The nuts and bolts films were concerned with teaching specific skills. There were films on the thousand-and-one specialized activities which men in service had to learn.
The orientation films, on the other hand, are of special interest to us, because they resemble the Hollywood commercial product a little more closely. As the term implies, the orientation films used in the army were concerned with modifying the attitudes, beliefs, and motives of the individuals who were exposed to them. The best example of the orientation films, some of which you may have seen, were the "Why We Fight" series. "The Battle of Britain," "The Battle of Russia," and "The Battle of China" are three notable examples.
These films were magnificently done. They were made by the besttrained film people, writers and directors and so on, in Hollywood, and that means from the technical point of view probably the best that can be found anywhere. These are magnificent documentaries, interesting, dramatic, exciting.
The general intent of these films was to interpret the goals of the war to the soldier, to increase his confidence in our allies, and to intensify his hostility toward the enemy—in a word to strengthen his motivation to fight. The general method was to marshal the facts in the most cinematically effective and dramatic form, and allow the soldier to draw his own conclusions. This is, of course, a widely accepted method and is the basis of much educational procedure.
The analysis of the effects of these films has recently been published in one of the four volumes called Studies in Social Psychology in World War II.
[1] C. I. Hovland, A. Lunsdaine, and F. D. Shef field, Experiments on Mass Communications, Vol. III (Princeton University Press, 1949).
Volume III, called "Experiments on Mass Communication," reports the results of all the tests of the effects of these films.Now what are the results?
In the first place, the nuts and bolts films, the ones designed to teach skills, as tested in this and similar investigations, showed up very well; they were successful as adjuncts in the process of training soldiers in these various specific skills and imparting specific information. But, when the test results of the effects of the orientation films on general attitudes and motivations were carefully analyzed they were found, on the whole, not very great. That is to say, when opinions and beliefs were tested in various ways before exposure to the film, and then retested afterward, there was surprisingly little change in the direction intended by the makers of the film. The most definite effects were on the amount of factual knowledge and on opinions specifically covered by the film. The films had very little effect on opinions or attitudes of a more general nature. In the matter of the men's motivation to serve as soldiers—one of the primary objectives of the orientation film program—the tests showed no effects.
An interesting exception to these general results was the so-called sleeper effect. It was found that in some groups, although there was no detectable effect on opinions and presumably on behavior, immediately after the film, there were effects that could be detected some nine weeks later, especially in individuals shown by tests to be already predisposed to accept a particular opinion.
If you are concerned with carrying the torch for films as a means of affecting people's opinions and motivations, the sleeper effect should give you some support. If it turns out that this delayed effect is especially marked on the individual's generalized attitudes rather than on specific attitudes, it will be an important finding indeed. This will be true even if this effect is restricted to individuals already predisposed in the direction of the film content.
I have briefly, much too briefly, summarized some of the results of a very extensive research on the effects of films, especially on attitudes and opinions. And bear in mind that it is with regard to this area that many people are most nervous. They fear that a film showing violence, as I have said, may make people tolerant of violence. In other words, they assume that people, or at least certain people, passively accept whatever is presented to them on the screen or in the TV and radio program. While it is true that we cannot translate directly to the Hollywood commercial product the results of these investigations on a particular kind of film shown under the conditions that existed in the war situation, nevertheless they
There are other researches that bear on this last point. I will describe very briefly an investigation of a more specific sort which was undertaken at the University of California by Dr. Daniel Wilner working as a graduate student under my direction.
[2] Daniel Wilner, "Attitude as a Determinant of Perception in the Mass Media of Communications: Reactions to the Motion Picture Home of the Brave" (unpublished Ph.D. diss., 1950, on file in the library of the University of California, Los Angeles campus).
You may have seen the film called Home of the Brave. It is an excellent film, and is, in fact, the first film which broke the taboo that had existed for a long time in Hollywood regarding films in which the problem of the Negro and Negro-white relations was the central theme. It is a dramatic, even a melodramatic film, the protagonist of which is a Negro soldier.
We were interested in finding out how individuals who by various tests are known to be highly prejudiced against Negroes react to this film, as contrasted with individuals at the other end of the scale who have very little or no prejudice. In other words, in this type of experiment we deliberately selected individuals who have known but differing attitudes toward the major themes of the communication content, and we asked ourselves the question: How do they handle communicated material which is contrary to their already-accepted beliefs?
In viewing this film the high-prejudice people are put, psychologically speaking, on a spot because its basic theme is, from their point of view, an affront. It exposes frankly and dramatically many of the stereotypes and beliefs about Negroes which they have accepted and now hold very close to their hearts. So you might expect—well, what would you expect?
We found that to an amazing degree the high-prejudice individuals were enabled in terms of their patterns of belief and stereotypes to revise the content of the film and see in it or select from it that which they wanted to see. That is, if the film may be said to have a "message" or basic theme, these people did not get it, or got it in a distorted form. For example, some might have found, in the collapse of the Negro soldier, reaffirmation of their belief in the inferiority of the Negro race.
This is probably not true of all the high-prejudice people. There is undoubtedly a very small hard-core group that are intellectually aware of their prejudice, and are able to watch a film of this type with a superior smile; they reject it in toto.
Findings of this sort mean that people can modify, or, to use our psychological jargon, restructure material of this type to suit their needs and beliefs. This perhaps explains why this film, in spite of its supposedly "controversial" character, was a box-office success in the South as well as in other parts of the country.
From this we cannot conclude with certainty what its effects have been on attitudes about Negros or Negro-white relations. It may be that people can see this film, and come out with their prejudices intact, or, perhaps, actually strengthened. These patterns of evasion, as they are called, are numerous and subtle and undoubtedly have nullified many a well-intended program of social reëducation.
Let us look at another investigation, again of the effects of a Hollywood film.
[3] M. Wiese and S. Cole, "A Study of Children's Attitudes and the Influence of a Commercial Motion Picture," Journal of Psychology, XXI (1946), 151–171.
During the war a film called Tomorrow the World was produced. It was based on the successful Broadway play of the same name. Tomorrow the World is the story of a dreadful teenage Nazi boy who is brought to this country and to the home of an American college professor. Here he endeavors to Nazify his companions, upsets the whole household of the college professor, and even tries to wreck the latter's approaching marriage with a Jewish girl. At the end we find this boy, Emil, in the hands of the police.The question posed by the film is what can you do with Emil? Can he be reëducated? Can German youth be reëducated? In 1942 these were, as they still are, pressing questions.
This film was shown by Doctors Wiese and Cole to about 4,000 children ranging from the fourth grade to the eighth grade. Some of the children were from very superior homes. Others came from a very depressed or semislum area. And the third group were several hundred children from middle-class homes in Salt Lake City. I haven't space to describe the details of the methods used by Doctors Wiese and Cole. In general their purpose was to give the children an opportunity to tell what they got out
So these children had a chance to react to a number of questions before and after seeing the film. There were some very striking differences among the different social groups. The children from the depressed area in Los Angeles—a large proportion of whom were Negroes as well as representatives of other ethnic groups—were much more punitive and realistic in their attitude toward Emil. Also, they were not shocked by his ruthless and gangster-like behavior as were the children from the middle-and upper-class homes. It is a type of behavior with which they had some familiarity.
The children coming from socially and economically superior homes had a more detached, almost philosophic attitude. They—especially the children from middle-class homes—tended to see Emil and his problem in terms of the stereotyped, idealized formulas regarding democracy and the American way of life which they had learned in school. The upper-class children were especially reactive to Emil's anti-Semitism, which the film brought out very strongly. A considerable proportion of the children in this group came from Jewish homes.
Other findings of the study bear out these trends. The point is that there was much variation in what this film meant to groups of children coming from differing social and economic backgrounds. What they got from the film was in part conditioned by their socioeconomic background.
Similar findings were obtained in a recently reported study of the effects of a non-Hollywood film called Don't Be a Sucker.
[4] E. Cooper and H. Dinerman, "Analysis of the Film ‘Don't Be a Sucker’: A Study in Communication," Public Opinion Quarterly, XV (1951), 243–264.
This film was made by the Army Signal Corps during World War II and was specifically designed to reduce intergroup prejudice. In fictional form it endeavors to expose the dangerous and anti-democratic purposes of rabble rousers who try to stimulate hatred toward various minority groups. The investigators, Eunice Cooper and Helen Dinerman, planned a research designed to discover the extent to which the "messages" of the film came through to audiences of high school students and adults. Briefly summarized, theyAgain, these results seem to document the notion that the impact of the mass media of communication cannot be conceived in simple cause-and-effect terms. We must revise our view that whatever is "in" a film or radio program will somehow inevitably come through and have a predetermined effect on those exposed to it.
There is one other type of research that I want to refer to, and this gets us over into radio. These are investigations concerned with the soap opera. Most people, especially "intelligent consumers," never listen to them. They seem trivial and trite. But they do have a large listening audience among housewives. The researcher asks the question: What function do these programs have for their listeners? The investigations on this problem indicate that soap operas serve a variety of socially meaningful functions for the housewives who listen. Broadly speaking, they furnish her with vicarious experience. This may seem strange to sophisticated people, but, strange or not, the housewife sees in the soap opera some reflection of her own problems, and she gets some assistance on her own problems in the solutions or the attempts at solution which are presented in the soap opera itself.
This is a kind of finding about the effects which has a slightly more, shall we say, positive tone than the findings that I have been describing. But, even here the relationship between program content and response is not a simple one; it is not an effect in which the ideas that are presented via the program are projected in some direct way on people's minds with direct effects on attitudes and behavior. The effects are selective, and are dependent on already existing needs.
This, then, is roughly and sketchily the picture of some of the research results to date on this enormously complicated problem of effects of the mass media of communication.
What can we say about them? What does this add up to? Well, it is very hard to formulate any broad generalization that will make all of this rather contradictory material fall into place. We still have the fact—if it is a
In any event the exact nature of this impact is not clear. It may on occasion be highly specific. If shiny motor cars are driven by glamorous males or females in movies, it may well increase the demand for American automobiles in Calcutta but not necessarily in Timbuktu. In Timbuktu they may believe motor cars are inhabited by evil spirits. In many oriental countries public embracing and kissing is regarded as indecent and such scenes have to be deleted from our films. But if this taboo is disappearing, it does not necessarily mean that Hollywood films alone are responsible. My point is that because the audience for the mass media is large it is not amorphous and faceless, ready to accept anything projected on it.
The researches I have reviewed here in general support this. The viewer and listener are dynamic participants in the situation. They react on the content presented rather than reacting to it. How they react is determined by many factors only one of which is the content of the film itself. This is not equivalent to saying that film and radio have no effects. Rather, it raises the much more complicated question of what effects under what conditions.
What does this mean so far as the intelligent consumer is concerned? What should he do?
I think we ought to see, if the results of these investigations have any meaning, that a certain note of caution has been sounded. Certain caution is called for before we launch ourselves on a program of immediate change of film and radio content or TV content because we are fearful that it is going to have certain effects, presumably effects which we disapprove.
I should point out that once you launch yourself along the path of regulating the content of films or other mass media, you are, if you do not watch out, going directly toward some form of censorship, some form of continuous and permanent control. This may, of course, be what you intend. If so it raises a number of thorny and very complicated problems, the chief of which is: Who is to decide what the "good" content is? Who is to be the censor?
We say we want "good" films, and "good" radio programs, but we are pretty vague as to what we mean by "good." Sometimes I think we mean by "good," films and radio programs which are not disturbing to us.
I have been impressed by the fact that people who are shocked by the radio programs or the films or the comic strips, never seem to be afraid that they themselves are going to be harmed. It is always somebody else who is in danger; it is Johnny, or the people on the other side of the tracks, about whose morals they are fearful. I wonder if they are not projecting their own disturbance with the problems that are sometimes raised in these films.
Take the matter of violence. It is the depiction of violence, I find, that is upsetting to many of my friends who go to movies occasionally. They think there is "too much" violence in films and radio programs. They think this has bad effects, not on them of course, but on children or other people whose moral fiber is presumably weaker than theirs. We live in a world in which violence, both individual and mass, is the rule and not the exception. In fact, the amount of real violence in the world is considerably greater than all the violence that will ever be shown in films. It may be that violence in films is actually a rather pale reflection of the violence in the real world. It may be, also, that people who are upset by it are really suffering from certain guilt feelings. They are uneasily aware of this violent world and perhaps, in some degree, of their own responsibility for it. It is easy to reduce the uneasiness which we all feel in the present turbulent world by blaming films. This is a scapegoating mechanism with which social psychologists are already familiar.
But to come back to the problem of improving films and the other mass media. I do not wish to be understood as saying that films should not be better than they are, or that it is impossible to have critical standards for evaluating them. I am convinced that most intelligent consumers of films could play a more effective role in this matter if, in addition to moral indignation, they had a clearer understanding of what they have a right to expect from films, radio, and TV. Conceivably this might be achieved by a course on how to evaluate motion pictures. Such a course would sketch the historical development of the film and present information about the more important technical devices which distinguish the films from other media of communication. Here the intelligent consumer would learn something about the styles and methods of different directors and screen writers. These differ as do the methods of creative artists
Most important, such a course should include something about the psychological and social role of drama and storytelling in human society. We should understand some of the human needs which are served by these agencies. Such a course should give the intelligent consumer a basis for demanding not just "better" films, but films which deal significantly with significant problems, and with no loss of their entertainment quality. It is not a question of eliminating a particular kind of action in a film that happens to disturb us, but a question of whether the disturbing action is placed in some sort of meaningful context so that we have a better understanding that makes a movie or story or play exciting and hence, in the real sense of a much-overworked word, entertaining. In this sense, if motion pictures are to achieve their full potential, they will be more rather than less disturbing because they will deal with disturbing problems. This will be achieved not by emasculating films through hampering restrictions, but by demanding that they deal honestly with every kind of human problem.
But with or without special courses, I have indicated some of the reasons why I think the intelligent consumer should proceed with caution over a terrain which is full of unsuspected pitfalls and much of which isn't even mapped. I don't believe the great mass media stand so much in need of policing as they do of intelligent analysis, and moral indignation is not enough.