Morgan E. Ellithorpe

Ignorance or bias? Evaluating the ideological and informational drivers of communication gaps about climate change

Does the relationship between media use and learning about climate change depend more on audiences’ scientific literacy on their ideological biases? To answer this question, we evaluate both the knowledge gap and belief gap hypotheses as they relate to climate change. Results indicate belief gaps for news and entertainment content and a knowledge gap for edutainment content. Climate change knowledge among conservatives decreased with greater attention to political news, but increased with greater attention to science news. TV entertainment was associated with a significant decrease in knowledge about climate change among liberals to similar levels as conservatives. Edutainment was associated with a widening gap in knowledge based on respondents’ scientific literacy. Implications for informal learning about controversial science through the media are discussed.

Wanting to See People Like Me? Racial and Gender Diversity in Popular Adolescent Television.

Media are one source for adolescent identity development and social identity gratifications. Nielsen viewing data across the 2014–2015 television season for adolescents ages 14–17 was used to examine racial and gender diversity in adolescent television exposure. Compared to US Census data, mainstream shows under represent women, but the proportion of Black characters is roughly representative. Black adolescents watch more television than non-Black adolescents and, after taking this into account, shows popular with Black adolescents are more likely than shows popular with non-Black adolescents to exhibit racial diversity. In addition, shows popular with female adolescents are more likely than shows popular with males to exhibit gender diversity. These results support the idea that adolescents seek out media messages with characters that are members of their identity groups, possibly because the characters serve as tools for identity development and social identity gratifications.

Laughing at Risk: Sitcom Laugh Tracks Communicate Norms for Behavior

The role that sitcom laugh tracks play in the communication of social norms was investigated. Participants (n = 112) were exposed to a sitcom narrative in which reckless driving behaviors were exhibited, or a control narrative. One half of the participants viewed a clip with laugh track present, and the other half viewed a clip with the laugh track edited out. Results indicate that laugh tracks do communicate information about what kinds of driving behavior is normative in the target driving clip condition. Specifically, the accessibility of risky driving injunctive norms was influenced by the laugh track and scenario manipulation. This effect was moderated by identification with the character who exhibited reckless behavior. Accessibility of risky driving norms then predicted attitudes, descriptive norms, and behavioral intentions regarding risky driving. The implication of the results is that media narratives can communicate norms for behavior through the laugh track in a sitcom.

Die, Foul Creature! How the Supernatural Genre Affects Attitudes Toward Outgroups Through Strength of Human Identity

The presence of non-humans in media narratives - for example, in the supernatural genre - may make salient that we are all human. According to the common ingroup identity model, the human superordinate category should influence attitudes toward lower-level outgroups. The present study examines this in the context of ethnic outgroups, specifically African Americans. Similarity of supernatural villains to humans was manipulated to influence whether “human” was a relevant superordinate group. Additionally, character race was varied to understand the influence of group diversity cues. Consistent with the common ingroup identity model, exposure to a Black human character fighting non-humans reduces prejudice toward African Americans, and this reduced prejudice generalizes to other minority groups. Results suggest a complex relationship between exposure to supernatural villains and diversity cues on attitudinal outcomes, with identity as human as one possible mechanism for reducing prejudicial attitudes.

Mortality salience influences attitudes and information-seeking behavior related to organ donation

Abstract Organ donation rates in the United States are not nearly high enough to cover the needs of people on the transplant waiting lists. Thus, it is important to understand the barriers for potential organ donors, and find contexts when persuasive efforts can be most successful. Using terror management theory as a framework, the present study employed an experimental design in which participants read narratives in which a character died or experienced pain as a manipulation of mortality salience. Mortality salience predicted death thought accessibility, and that was associated with more positive attitudes toward organ donation and more information-seeking behavior regarding organ donation. Results also suggest that organ donation may be one avenue to deal with death-related anxiety, as a form of worldview defense. Our findings have implications for health campaigns and indicate that narrative-based messages that remind people of their mortality may be effective in persuading people to become organ donors.

Preparation and Analyses of Implicit Attitude Measures: Challenges, Pitfalls, and Recommendations

Implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and the Personalized-IAT can be useful tools for studying automatic processes and socially sensitive topics. But their reliance on reaction time data comes with issues for data preparation and analysis. Dealing with reaction time data can be complex – exacerbated by many steps and available alternatives. Greenwald et al. (2003) offer guidelines for handling IAT data. However, these guidelines are often cited with little information as to which steps and alternatives were chosen. This provides latitudes of freedom for researchers to choose the version that is most likely to give desired results, not necessarily the one that best reflects the data or matches other work. This manuscript reports what happens when steps in data cleaning and analysis are omitted or changed, finding variations in relationships between variables and the potential for significance tests to change depending on the version used.

So Close and Yet So Far: Construal Level Moderates Cultivation Effects

The cultivation effect is well established: The more media we consume, the more our worldviews come to reflect the mediated world. Several advancements have been made in the past decade exploring the processes underlying the effect. Importantly, the judgments are often heuristically based (Shrum, 2001, 2009), with relevance of the media information an important moderator of this process. Mental construal level, in which people are considered to be thinking on a relatively concrete (psychologically close, specific) level or a relatively abstract (psychologically distant, general) level, may influence these cognitive processes. The present studies find that mental construal level (concrete or abstract) moderates the classic cultivation effect for first-order judgments. Specifically, concrete construal encourages the cultivation effect with a stronger relationship between media consumption and violence prevalence estimates, but abstract construal reduces the effect. Comparison to a control condition in Experiment 2 indicates that concrete construal may be the default state for cultivation effects. One possible explanation for the effect of construal on cultivation effects is that construal influences relevance of and reliance on media cues in judgment formation.

Putting the "self" in self-deprecation: When deprecating humor about minorities is acceptable

Abstract This study tested how source knowledge affects enjoyment of self-deprecating humor about a minority group. Participants made aware that the source of a message poking fun at people with disabilities was himself disabled had more positive evaluations of the cartoon and author than participants unaware of his disability. Participants initially given no source information judged the author more positively the second time when they were given follow-up source information. Finally, some effects were moderated by the disability status of the message receiver, such that having a disability or knowing someone who does predicted higher liking of the cartoons when the author is disabled but lower liking when he is not. The results suggest a role for self-deprecating humor in intergroup relations, and predict when such humor will be accepted by minority and non-minority group members.

So Why Do You Think That Way?: Examining the Role Implicit Attitudes and Motivation Play in Audience’s Perception of a Racially Charged Issue

Events in Ferguson (MO), the Eric Garner incident, and most recently Chicago (IL), have again brought perceptions of race to the forefront of the public’s conscience. Often perceptions of racially charged events are split along racial lines with Whites often siding with law enforcement and Blacks seeing a miscarriage of justice. Bifurcated perceptions along racial lines are nothing new, dating back to the early 1900s. Despite this schism, few analyses have examined the genesis of this difference in perceptions on racial issues. This analysis looks to fill that gap. Specifically, we examine the role media frames and people’s preexisting attitudes and motivations play in determining what they think of contentious race issues and the people involved in them. Using the Jena Six incident as a case study, we find that people with less egalitarian racial attitudes—and low motivation to hide those attitudes—are less likely to blame race-related problems on mitigating cultural factors. They are also more likely judge news stories about a racial issue as being low quality. However, thematically framed stories that include discussion of the cultural aspects of the event may help to reduce this process.

I Didn’t See That Coming: Spoilers, Fan Theories, and Their Influence on Enjoyment and Parasocial Breakup Distress During a Series Finale.

Spoilers are stigmatized as the potential ruin of narrative experience, and many people avoid them for the fear that exposure will, well, spoil the narrative. However, previous research indicates that spoilers can actually increase enjoyment. The present study tests mental model resonance as a mechanism for how spoilers influence enjoyment of media content in a real-world context, using a 2-part survey administered before and after the finale of a long-running TV series. Fan theories about content are also offered as a related, but separate issue from spoiler exposure. Parasocial breakup distress is tested as a previously unexamined outcome of spoiler and fan theory exposure. Results suggest that exposure to spoilers and belief in fan theories increase enjoyment and decrease parasocial breakup distress after a TV series finale, and this is mediated by mental model resonance.