Ccultivation Theory: Cultivation Analysis

Cultivation theory (cultivation hypothesis or cultivation analysis) was introduced by Professor George Gerbner who was the dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. In the mid-1960, Professor Gerbner originated to research long-term impacts of media which is called cultural indicators. The intention of this project is to study how audiences’ behavior especially violent behavior can be shaped by media. Moreover, Gerbner found that television has become more popular in societies, especially in America, and TV has a great influence in order to lead audience perspective. Furthermore, television cause a lot of impacts which are micro level and macro level to viewers. As Yarbor (2014) mentioned, “Gerbner’s

Firstly, change of involvement with violence occurs when heavy viewers assume that they have a higher chance of involving in aggressive incidents than others. For example, light viewers might predict that they have only one chance out of hundred of being a victim of crimes; meanwhile, heavy viewers may believe that their chance is one out of ten. The next attitude is fear of walking alone at night. Referring to Cheema (2013), “Women were more afraid than men, but both sexes who were heavy viewers, overestimated criminal activity, believing it to be ten times more than figures indicate”. The third one is called perceived activity of police. People who are heavy viewers tend to overthink that five percent of citizens in society are mostly associated with law enforcement which is more than light viewers around four percent. Additionally, general mistrust of people is when heavy viewers view the world more terribly, so they can not trust anyone. Moreover, people who have this attitude will think that other people only care about themselves, and people will take advantages from others if they have a chance, and Gerbner called this attitude as the mean world

Stereotype is used to classify a group of people by their gender, race, and religion. In addition, gender stereotype has played a big role in society. For instance, many people believe that most of rich men want beautiful and sexy women, and women want to marry with luxury men. There are many examples of this kind of stereotype including disney’s movies. In all disney’s cartoon, they mostly have the same plot that princesses are helpless, slim, white, and beautiful. Besides, princes who are rich, handsome, manly, and charming will always marry princesses not because of their talents but beauty. Moreover, if women who are not beautiful and attractive, they normally are evil characters in movies such as Ursula in little mermaid. Gender stereotype harmfully affects children’s mind, because children will remember what they have seen, and their attitude are also shaped by media (Cultivation Theory, n.d.). Furthermore, religious stereotype has become more serious since 911 incidence. Some American people believe that not every people who are Muslim are terrorists, but most of terrorists around the world are Muslim (Obeidallah, 2015). To clarify, after the incident, many films represent Muslims as a group of terrorist. As a result, some Muslims are unacceptable in some societies because of the