Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you're welcome to Stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind. My name is Robert Lamb. You know I'm
Speaker 1: Julie Douglas. Julie. What do you fear the most? Dear?
Speaker 1: The most fear dear? Yeah, that's a pretty good one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the fear itself, right, might as well fear it.
Speaker 1: Sure it's incapacitating. Yeah, so not like wild dogs or anything. No,
Speaker 1: no griffins. You um. Probably I probably fear like all
Speaker 1: the mundane stuff now that we'll get into in a bit.
Speaker 1: Used to it was alien abductions though when I was
Speaker 1: when I was like a junior high kid, I was
Speaker 1: terrified of alien abductions. And then I went through like
Speaker 1: a one week phase or maybe it was a month
Speaker 1: in high school where I was terrified of car rex
Speaker 1: Like I was just convinced that if my family got
Speaker 1: in a car, we'd go out. You know, we're driving
Speaker 1: to look at Christmas lights, and I was like, this
Speaker 1: is a needless rest. We were clearly all going to perish.
Speaker 1: And then it passed. Is this because you had seen
Speaker 1: some some sort of public service announcement driving I bet
Speaker 1: so I imagine that both of these fears were directly
Speaker 1: related to the stuff that I was absorbing, be it
Speaker 1: unsolved mysteries in the case of the alien abductions, or yes,
Speaker 1: some special about highway safety in the case of the
Speaker 1: vehicle fear. And you know now that I think about it,
Speaker 1: when I was around eight years old, I saw a
Speaker 1: documentary on an atom bomb, and I remember having nightmares
Speaker 1: about being with my family on a cliff and watching
Speaker 1: the sun melt and everything around me just perish. Um. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think if you guys are listening alone, you're going
Speaker 1: to start to see this link here between media consumption
Speaker 1: and how it informs our fears. Indeed, we're talking about
Speaker 1: something called mean world syndrome, which is which is a
Speaker 1: fascinating theory they were going to unwrap for you here,
Speaker 1: and it it really God, it's really really gets its
Speaker 1: tentacles into just about everything in our daily life. It does.
Speaker 1: And before we explore that a bit more, we want
Speaker 1: to thank listener Joseph who wrote us about our episode
Speaker 1: The Dark and sent us a link to a survey
Speaker 1: about what Americans fear most, which kicked off this whole
Speaker 1: exploration of the mean world syndrome, which in which there
Speaker 1: is also a documentary. It's a two thousand and ten documentary,
Speaker 1: and we thought we would just pull a couple of
Speaker 1: quotes from it. Yeah. This comes from George Gebner, professor
Speaker 1: of communications and founder of cultivation theory UM, died in
Speaker 1: two thousand five. He says, most of us live rather
Speaker 1: insulated lives, and we don't meet too many people of
Speaker 1: other groups, of other races, other ethnic backgrounds than our own.
Speaker 1: Most of what we know about other races, other ethnic
Speaker 1: groups we know from television, and from television we get
Speaker 1: some very peculiar types of information. Now they interview a
Speaker 1: bunch of other people, including Michael Morgan and marsh mcclehen,
Speaker 1: who said, on the difficulty of measuring the effect of
Speaker 1: media on views perceptions quote, it's like the fish in
Speaker 1: the water. We don't know who discovered water, but we
Speaker 1: know it wasn't the fish. A pervasive medium, a pervasive
Speaker 1: environment is always beyond perception end quote. So that I
Speaker 1: think is the underlying conundrum here. We know that we're
Speaker 1: consuming media, UM, we know that we're consuming a lot
Speaker 1: more than we used to and in various different ways,
Speaker 1: but we're not entirely sure of the effects, but we
Speaker 1: do have Gardner's research to give us a clue of
Speaker 1: houses actually informing our worldview. Yeah, in worldview here is
Speaker 1: key because because we've hit on many times in this podcast, Uh,
Speaker 1: reality is different for everyone. There's certainly the subjective reality
Speaker 1: and an objective reality, but everyone's worldview is a little different,
Speaker 1: and everyone's everyone's model of reality in which we house
Speaker 1: ourselves you a little different and what what we build
Speaker 1: it out? After? What degree does media play into our
Speaker 1: construction of this particular world? Does objectivity really exist when
Speaker 1: you're trying to filter information through your own experiences and ideas?
Speaker 1: And that's a bit of what we'll get into today.
Speaker 1: But first we want to talk about this two thousand
Speaker 1: and fourteen Chapman University survey and it was a nationwide
Speaker 1: year long survey by the way UM. It was a
Speaker 1: poll of fifteen hundred Americans concerning their fears and concerns.
Speaker 1: And Dr Christopher Bator, who led this effort, said, what
Speaker 1: we learned through this initial survey that we had to
Speaker 1: phrase the questions according to fear versus concerned to capture
Speaker 1: the information correctly. So that's how we are presenting it,
Speaker 1: and indeed that is how they parse it out. And
Speaker 1: the reason for that is because fear and worry, although
Speaker 1: very closely related, have a kind of temporal difference, at
Speaker 1: least in my mind, uh it does. Fear feels immediate
Speaker 1: and worrying feels like a sort of existential threat, something
Speaker 1: that might happen in the in the future, whereas fear
Speaker 1: as the immediate future. Yeah, worry has kind of, you know,
Speaker 1: a certain amount of inevitability about it. I find like
Speaker 1: I worry about the things that will come to pass
Speaker 1: or may come to pass. But fear are sort of
Speaker 1: the the oddball things that might pop up on the
Speaker 1: on the on the dice roll of life, you know,
Speaker 1: the more random things. Right. Yeah. So top five things
Speaker 1: that Americans fear the most. This is what came out
Speaker 1: of this survey. The number one fear walking alone at
Speaker 1: night okay, very primal, okay. Number two becoming the victim
Speaker 1: of identity theft, very modern. Number three safety on the internet.
Speaker 1: Number four being the victim of a mass or random shooting,
Speaker 1: which ties to what you said in terms of fear
Speaker 1: and fear acts of randomness, right, And number five sticking
Speaker 1: out like a sore thumb in this list. Public speaking,
Speaker 1: That's that seems kind of crazy to me, because like,
Speaker 1: I'm not a fan of public speaking. I kind of
Speaker 1: view it it's kind of like vomiting while I'm doing it.
Speaker 1: I dislike it, But I don't spend the rest of
Speaker 1: my life worrying about the neck or fearing the next
Speaker 1: time I'm going to vomit or have to speak publicly, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's going to happen. What can I do about it?
Speaker 1: And you feel spent afterward? Right, You feel like you've
Speaker 1: got a blank slate to build upon. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that speaks a lot to how much people
Speaker 1: really dislike getting up and talking in front of other people.
Speaker 1: And I was thinking about that, was like, what does
Speaker 1: that mean. That means that they're afraid of failing and
Speaker 1: they're afraid of being judged, And that all makes sense.
Speaker 1: But then I thought why, though, why so? Why so
Speaker 1: common a fear? And I thought, I wonder if it's
Speaker 1: because in this day and age, public speaking isn't just
Speaker 1: speaking to two people in the room. It is now
Speaker 1: one person who is recording the video of it and
Speaker 1: putting it online so that two million other people can
Speaker 1: see it and judge you. So just recording a video
Speaker 1: for YouTube could be considered public speaking, Yes, I think
Speaker 1: I think that it could be considered that way. It's
Speaker 1: just who is my audience? What are they going to
Speaker 1: think of me? Am I going to fail or succeed
Speaker 1: at this? But that's that's of interest. But what about
Speaker 1: worry or concern? All right? Well, the Chapman Survey for
Speaker 1: worrying and concern breaks it down as follows. Number one
Speaker 1: having identity stolen on the Internet, number two corporate surveillance
Speaker 1: of Internet activity, number three running out of money in
Speaker 1: the future for government surveillance of Internet activity, and number
Speaker 1: five becoming ill or sick. So here we see kind
Speaker 1: of another lopsided array of things here, because becoming ill
Speaker 1: and sick, that's timeless like and reasonable that we're all
Speaker 1: going to worry about what's going to happen when some
Speaker 1: illness hits us, perhaps something we have little or no
Speaker 1: ability to uh to to prevent um. And then running
Speaker 1: out of money in the future, I think we can
Speaker 1: all relate to that to some point or another. You
Speaker 1: know that, what to what extent will I not be
Speaker 1: able to feed myself? How's myself feed myself, feed the
Speaker 1: people I love. How's the people I love in the future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again this list feels more incremental than immediate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like what will what will it be like for
Speaker 1: my future self? Will that will my future self have
Speaker 1: to deal with these various things. Whereas those fears like
Speaker 1: the two that caught out to me the most walking
Speaker 1: alone at night, Uh, certainly in safety on the internet,
Speaker 1: Like those are two that do you think about all
Speaker 1: the time when you're when you're in those environments. I
Speaker 1: don't know if I would say I outright have fear
Speaker 1: about safety on the internet, but certainly walking down the
Speaker 1: dark street, I mean, you just can't help it, but
Speaker 1: fear a little feel a little apprehensive. Well in terms
Speaker 1: of internet security too and finances. I feel like it's
Speaker 1: a given these days that at some point your information
Speaker 1: is going to be accessed or compromised. So I can
Speaker 1: see how that's also in the minds of people. Another
Speaker 1: thing that the survey revealed, And remember the survey covered
Speaker 1: only people, so the survey isn't exhaustive, but it did
Speaker 1: reveal that a decent amount of people who were surveyed
Speaker 1: exhibit magical thinking. So more specifically, these sort of causal
Speaker 1: relationships between actions and events that are not based on
Speaker 1: reason and observation. So, for example, in this study, more
Speaker 1: than of participants believe that Bigfoot is a real creature,
Speaker 1: about half believe that Satan causes most evil in the world.
Speaker 1: Pin it on Satan, Okay, and uh think they can
Speaker 1: influence the world with physical thought. I eat positive thoughts
Speaker 1: all of the book The Secret. So this one is
Speaker 1: a little trickier though, right, because as you had pointed
Speaker 1: out earlier when we were talking about this, do they
Speaker 1: go specifically into like what do they mean by effect
Speaker 1: things with positive thoughts? Because there's, um, you know, one
Speaker 1: column where it's like, yeah, I think I'm gonna do
Speaker 1: great on this test. I'm well prepared. I'm gonna just
Speaker 1: harness my positivity, and the other one is I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna stare at the answers and by magical thinking, I'm
Speaker 1: going to get the right one. Yeah, there's there's certainly
Speaker 1: a difference between just going into something with a positive
Speaker 1: mindset and trying to manifest uh situations in life just
Speaker 1: through pure thought. Um, it's interesting. I would I would certainly,
Speaker 1: you know, I certainly believe in that to a certain
Speaker 1: extent um, you know, just the power of positive thinking
Speaker 1: on the whole Satan Bigfoot thing. I actually think most
Speaker 1: of the evil caused in the world is due to
Speaker 1: big Foot. So I actually that's where I fall in
Speaker 1: that line. Do you think you think he's kind of
Speaker 1: like the shadow of Satan character? Yeah, yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1: I think he's Satan's furry agent on Earth. All right. So,
Speaker 1: I think what this data is bareing out or are
Speaker 1: bearing is that when it comes to cold, hard calculation
Speaker 1: about the physical world around us, we're not always engaging
Speaker 1: in critical objective thought. And this is when perception can
Speaker 1: falter exactly, and it falters along lines that have nothing
Speaker 1: to do with you know, skunk gates and devils. Uh.
Speaker 1: The Chapman survey here also found that the majority of
Speaker 1: majority of Americans not only actively fear crimes like child abduction,
Speaker 1: gang violence, sexual assault, and an other sort of you know,
Speaker 1: often sensationalized crimes of this this nature, they also believe
Speaker 1: these crimes had increased over the past twenty years. Now.
Speaker 1: This is particularly interesting when you look at statistical data
Speaker 1: from police and FBI records that actually showed that crime
Speaker 1: has decreased in America over the past two decades. The
Speaker 1: fact that that often often gets criminologists in trouble when
Speaker 1: they when they start pointing these these facts out when
Speaker 1: they say, I mean that the crime rate has actually
Speaker 1: gone down, no matter what it feels like. And certainly
Speaker 1: you know if you if you, if your life has
Speaker 1: been touched by by violent crime of one type or another,
Speaker 1: that that that those those statistics are going to seem
Speaker 1: less reliable. But likewise, what you have, what if your
Speaker 1: life hasn't been directly touched by this violence, but you
Speaker 1: simply are privy to it on a daily basis through
Speaker 1: your consumption of media. Well, and I think what colors
Speaker 1: this perception to that violence has gone up is that
Speaker 1: you often hear the that the United States, of all
Speaker 1: the developed countries, has one of the highest homicide rates.
Speaker 1: And then if you look at an FBI two thousand
Speaker 1: and eleven statistic of the more than twelve thousand homicides,
Speaker 1: you'll see that seventy of them were caused by firearms.
Speaker 1: It was homicide by firearms. So it kind of there's
Speaker 1: there's a there's an actual support of real threat there.
Speaker 1: But then there's the overall statistics which would tell you
Speaker 1: on a day to day basis us that crime has
Speaker 1: actually decreased. So it gets kind of sticky with this,
Speaker 1: especially when you bring firearms into the equation. And if
Speaker 1: you guys are interested in that, um, we encourage you
Speaker 1: to check out the article from The Atlantic. It's called
Speaker 1: quote gun Violence in America, the thirteen key questions with
Speaker 1: thirteen concercise answers. It's by Jonathan Straight And that'll give
Speaker 1: you a bit more information on the gun factor, which
Speaker 1: is very nuanced, complex and more than we can bite
Speaker 1: off in this particular episode. Yeah, and I'll include a
Speaker 1: link to that article on the landing page for this
Speaker 1: episode is stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Alright. So,
Speaker 1: some of the other contributing factors to perceived fear, according
Speaker 1: to the Chapman University survey, is that people with lower
Speaker 1: levels of education will exhibit significantly higher levels of fear
Speaker 1: regarding a bunch of stuff like personal safety, their future,
Speaker 1: running out of money, getting sick, Internet usage again, identity, theft,
Speaker 1: criminal victimization, government, the fear of government being oppressive, and
Speaker 1: so on and so forth, immigration, natural disasters, and man
Speaker 1: made disasters. And they found that watching television talk shows
Speaker 1: in particular UH with a high frequency was strongly related
Speaker 1: to fear, and not surprisingly, a studied diet of two
Speaker 1: crime true crime TV shows affects level of fear and individuals.
Speaker 1: And they have just more and more data on this.
Speaker 1: If you want to check it out, The actually break
Speaker 1: down fear factors into gender, political affiliation, race, and so
Speaker 1: on and so forth. So if you want to see
Speaker 1: more about that, definitely check out the University of Chapman's
Speaker 1: Fear Survey of Americans. And the reason we we brought
Speaker 1: out all of this data for you guys is that
Speaker 1: we felt like it was a good basis to explore
Speaker 1: the overall concept of mean world syndrome. Yes, mean world syndrome,
Speaker 1: which stems from cultivation theory. Now, cultivation theory is a
Speaker 1: social theory developed by George Gebner, who we mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: and Larry Gross from the University of Pennsylvania in the
Speaker 1: mid nineties sixties, and it examines the long term effects
Speaker 1: of television. So in essence, the idea here is that
Speaker 1: TV is cultivating our culture. UH think of you know,
Speaker 1: Shepherd Fairies, Obey graff d. I think of John Carpenter
Speaker 1: as they live with the the the the the the
Speaker 1: glasses that reveal what television is really informing onto the
Speaker 1: minds of the public um. And you have a pretty
Speaker 1: good idea about what's going on here. The TV is
Speaker 1: feeding your brain. It's informing our minds, both explicitly and
Speaker 1: implicitly on who and what we are, what sort of
Speaker 1: world we live in. So it's cultivating the viewers conceptions
Speaker 1: of social reality. Now, Groner and Gross study television programming
Speaker 1: for twenty two years, and each year they randomly selected
Speaker 1: a week in real hoarded prime time programming as well
Speaker 1: as children's weekend programming, and they identify the quantity of
Speaker 1: violence and programs, and they found them to be pretty
Speaker 1: stable overtime. For instance, dramas that feature violence averaged five
Speaker 1: violent acts per viewing hour. However, they found some inequalities
Speaker 1: in victimhood, with older people, women, and minorities particularly at
Speaker 1: risk in these acts of violence. So even though minorities
Speaker 1: were underrepresented on television, when they did appear, they were
Speaker 1: much more likely to be victims of violence. Now, to
Speaker 1: analyze the effects of the violence on the minds of
Speaker 1: the participants of Governor and Gross correlated the data from
Speaker 1: the content analysis of television were survey data from people
Speaker 1: who were classified based on the amount of time they
Speaker 1: spent watching TV. So of course you've got two groups here,
Speaker 1: heavy watchers of TV four plus hours and light watchers
Speaker 1: less than two hours. And using a survey he targeted
Speaker 1: four attitudes. So the first one was chances of involvement
Speaker 1: with violence. So what they found is that light viewers
Speaker 1: predicted their weekly odds of being involved in violence or
Speaker 1: something like one in one hundred, while heavy viewers said
Speaker 1: it was more like one in ten. Then the second
Speaker 1: attitude was fear of walking alone at night. Women were
Speaker 1: more afraid than men, but both sexes who were heavy
Speaker 1: viewers overestimated criminal activity, believing it to be ten times
Speaker 1: more than figures actually indicate. The third was perceived activity
Speaker 1: of police. Heavy viewers believe that about five percent of
Speaker 1: societies involved with law enforcement, and in comparison, the light
Speaker 1: viewers thought it looks like one which is about right
Speaker 1: and general mistrust of people. That's the fourth attitude. People
Speaker 1: who were heavy viewers tended to see other people's actions
Speaker 1: and motives more negatively. And if you drill down a
Speaker 1: little bit further into griner and grasses work, you'll find
Speaker 1: that they were looking at these very specific behaviors emerging,
Speaker 1: and they define them as mainstreaming, which is the process
Speaker 1: by which heavy viewing of television resulted in the similarity
Speaker 1: of perspective among viewers. And it didn't matter what they're
Speaker 1: their socio economic class was, or their education, those who
Speaker 1: were heavy TV viewers had this perspective. They all shared
Speaker 1: that there's a sort of mainstreaming of what they thought
Speaker 1: was going on. And then something called resonance, which was
Speaker 1: that if someone had a real life violent incident that
Speaker 1: happened to them, well, that was amplifying their experience and
Speaker 1: making it feel like it was more prevalent. And certainly
Speaker 1: the yeah, the resonance residence makes perfect sense. You have
Speaker 1: something like this, it touches your real life. It's going
Speaker 1: to completely color your perception of reality, even and even
Speaker 1: the even the news that you happen to catch on
Speaker 1: in the evening. Yeah, because you could in effect be
Speaker 1: experiencing that over and over again via these different situations,
Speaker 1: whether it's a report on the news or it's um
Speaker 1: some sort of c s i UH scenario. But the
Speaker 1: thing about this mean world syndrome is that it is
Speaker 1: not just about violence, it actually extends out further into
Speaker 1: the world. It's tendrils go a bit more into the
Speaker 1: social fabric. Indeed, yeah, I mean it's not television is
Speaker 1: not a media or not only cultivating our ideas about
Speaker 1: about what's going on in the world. They're cultivating our
Speaker 1: ideas about what what the human species is, what what
Speaker 1: our bodies should look like. Um. There's a two thousand
Speaker 1: three paper that was published in the Journal of Youth
Speaker 1: and Adolescence titled the Effect of thin ideal television commercials
Speaker 1: on Body dissatisfaction and schema activation during early adolescence. So,
Speaker 1: in this study, they presented two groups of girls with
Speaker 1: different sets of ads. One set had undernourished women in
Speaker 1: it and the other set did not. They exposed both
Speaker 1: groups of girls to these ads and the results the
Speaker 1: girls who saw the ads with the emaciated models experienced
Speaker 1: immediate episodes of insecurity and distress about their weight. What's more,
Speaker 1: two years later, the same girls still reported greater dissatisfaction
Speaker 1: with their bodies as compared to the other group of
Speaker 1: girls who didn't have to witness the emaciated models in
Speaker 1: the commercials. So the idea here is the continued exposure
Speaker 1: to unrealistic body types in the in the media affected
Speaker 1: the girls perceptions about what a normal, healthy, human female
Speaker 1: body looks like. Again, the media is cultivating our understanding
Speaker 1: of reality, and in this case, it's cultivating our ideas
Speaker 1: about what your body should look like. That's fascinating to me.
Speaker 1: So over a number of years, this database gets built
Speaker 1: up in your mind about what is normal, when in fact,
Speaker 1: if you look at the normal statistics for proportions and women,
Speaker 1: it's nothing like what is represented in media. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's it's it's not not only the outer world that
Speaker 1: is that is skewed, but it's also the inner world.
Speaker 1: It's both looking out and looking inward. Uh, you end
Speaker 1: up with unrealistic expectations about what's gonna happen. All Right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break. When we get back,
Speaker 1: we are going to talk more about the lovers that
Speaker 1: we're pulling here with this meanworld syndrome. Alright, we're back. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, in all of this, I kept thinking about
Speaker 1: the television series Sons of Anarchy, which I think I
Speaker 1: mentioned previously. Just in the space of a month sort
Speaker 1: of been want bench watched the entire run of the
Speaker 1: show like seven series seasons of it, and the whole time,
Speaker 1: I was just really struck by how violent the show is.
Speaker 1: And I'm I'm kind of I'm used to violent shows,
Speaker 1: but I think the based on some some online staff,
Speaker 1: I was looking at the members of the biker gang
Speaker 1: in this series kill a hundred and fifty three people
Speaker 1: in the main care Jack's teller, who you're supposed to
Speaker 1: be the most sympathetic towards throughout the show, kills forty
Speaker 1: six people here in the course of the show, like
Speaker 1: every episode has some sort of horrible, cold blooded murder
Speaker 1: in it and uh, and so I just kept thinking, like,
Speaker 1: what is this? What is this doing to me? You
Speaker 1: know what? How is this affecting my awareness? And and
Speaker 1: am I more afraid of Outlaw Motorcycle Club now than
Speaker 1: I was in the past? I don't know. You know,
Speaker 1: That's how I felt with Breaking Bad. Um. I love
Speaker 1: that series, but it was really hard to watch and
Speaker 1: it gave me the sense that the world is a rotten,
Speaker 1: stinking thing. And that's why I like to watch you
Speaker 1: Gaba Gabba. It's a lot more positive and uh, and
Speaker 1: it's easier to binge watch the entire the entire run
Speaker 1: of the show and it's got great music too, exactly. Um.
Speaker 1: In terms of binge watching, uh, this is an interesting
Speaker 1: area when especially talking about cultivation theory and mean world syndrome,
Speaker 1: because I mean, binge watching has been around for a while,
Speaker 1: but though not in name, uh, for a while, it's
Speaker 1: been possible to get the entire run of a series
Speaker 1: and just throw yourself into it. For a while, it's
Speaker 1: been possible to go to the video Stongeres were in
Speaker 1: a bunch of stuff and watch it before they can
Speaker 1: lose yourself in in in a book, in a comic book,
Speaker 1: what have you. But in recent years we've seen been
Speaker 1: binge watching pushed as an acceptable and even uh preferable
Speaker 1: model of media consumption. Netflix puts out you know, all
Speaker 1: of the new season of the House of Cards and
Speaker 1: you and you can just watch all of it, just
Speaker 1: lose yourself in the show. Or Amazon Prime i think,
Speaker 1: follows the same model with some of their shows that
Speaker 1: have come out, which is really enjoyable. I have to
Speaker 1: say I'm not slamming it, because it can be really
Speaker 1: great to lose yourself in the show and just and
Speaker 1: not have to wait after each cliffhanger On the other hand,
Speaker 1: it's normalizing this sort of binge watching behavior that we
Speaker 1: might not have all engaged in before. And if you've
Speaker 1: got ten different series chewed up that you're binge watching,
Speaker 1: that's a lot of consumption of these various world models.
Speaker 1: And uh so it's, like I said, it's a new
Speaker 1: area for the most part. So there hasn't been a
Speaker 1: lot of research done on binge watching and what it's
Speaker 1: doing to us. But there was a two thousand fifteen
Speaker 1: studied by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin,
Speaker 1: and they found that the more lonely and depressed you are,
Speaker 1: the more likely you are to binge watch. They conducted
Speaker 1: a survey on three hundred sixteen eighteen to twenty nine
Speaker 1: year olds on how often they watched TV, how often
Speaker 1: they had feelings of loneliness, depression, and self regulation deficiency,
Speaker 1: and finally how often they binge watched television. They found
Speaker 1: that the more lonely and depressed you are, the more
Speaker 1: likely you are to binge watch television. And an attempt
Speaker 1: to distance yourself from what's troubling you, you know, to
Speaker 1: escape from your fears and escape from your anxieties. And
Speaker 1: UH and simply become one with the fictional world. And
Speaker 1: as with a lot of binge behavior, loneliness to press
Speaker 1: and self regulation deficiency are all key factors here. So again,
Speaker 1: you dived into the deep end of the TV pool
Speaker 1: in order to forget what's bothering you. Now back to
Speaker 1: the question though, is it harmful? Right? Because, as we said,
Speaker 1: doesn't feel harmful when you're engaging in it. Um. This
Speaker 1: is where the researchers from the University of Texas at
Speaker 1: Austin argue that you have all these other factors that
Speaker 1: are potentially setting in physical fatigue, higher propensity for obesity,
Speaker 1: as well as other health concerns UH factor and potential
Speaker 1: work neglect, potential relationship neglect, and you have a potentially
Speaker 1: destructive cycle on your hands. Now, imagine that if all
Speaker 1: you ever watched, you binge watched was true crime TV.
Speaker 1: Okay a can you would have this sense that this
Speaker 1: was a rotten, stinking world And and a follow up
Speaker 1: of sorts to Gripner and Grosses true crime TV watching,
Speaker 1: Glenn Sparks and Susan Helsing at Pretty University surveyed one
Speaker 1: hundreds and three jury eligible adults about their TV watching habits.
Speaker 1: They found that the heavy TV crime viewers estimated two
Speaker 1: and a half times more real world deaths due to
Speaker 1: murder than non viewers of this type of television. So
Speaker 1: that that's a statistic that would really tell you that
Speaker 1: the mindsets of people are being colored, particularly when they
Speaker 1: are engaging in this type of TV, which over and
Speaker 1: over again you see these terrible crime scenes, these crimes
Speaker 1: that have been perpetuated against people, a lot of women. Um.
Speaker 1: And then the other thing that they found again that
Speaker 1: that that Gardner and Gross had found, was that heavy
Speaker 1: true crime TV watchers misjudged the number of law enforcement
Speaker 1: officers and attorneys in the total workforce. So lawyers, police
Speaker 1: they each make up about less than one percent of workforce,
Speaker 1: but those surveyed estimated it at more than six and
Speaker 1: eight respectively. Yeah, because you end up just consuming, first
Speaker 1: of all, some of the worst stories out there about
Speaker 1: about what happens in the course of human life. And
Speaker 1: then and then just my this focusing on all the
Speaker 1: details of the criminal investigation, and many times they're going
Speaker 1: to be a high profile case that's covered in these
Speaker 1: shows too, where it's going to have an unrealistic portrayal
Speaker 1: of how many people show up at a crime scene,
Speaker 1: what kind of resources are leveled. It's it's solving it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Sparks and Helsing also found that the True crime
Speaker 1: TV watchers were also more likely to be fearful about
Speaker 1: walking alone in a city at night. Of course, right
Speaker 1: you're watching True crime TV, um and it reminds me
Speaker 1: of the episode we did about phobias, and we were
Speaker 1: talking about spiders, and if I'm recalling this correctly, in
Speaker 1: one of the experiments, those people who were identified as
Speaker 1: having serious phobias about spiders were asked to draw the
Speaker 1: spiders and try to figure out the dimensions. And what
Speaker 1: they found in those people with the really high phobias
Speaker 1: of spiders is that their dimensions were huge. They were
Speaker 1: largely outsized compared to the actual realistic dimensions of the spider.
Speaker 1: But those who didn't have the phobia had the more
Speaker 1: or less correct dimensions of the spider. And I think
Speaker 1: about this. I think this is like the spider in
Speaker 1: the brain of fear just expanding out in people who
Speaker 1: are on a steady diet of this type of TV. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you end up in a situation where you think, every
Speaker 1: time I step out the door, I'm potentially going to
Speaker 1: be assaulted or thrown into a van, uh, targeted by
Speaker 1: a serial murder, etcetera. Well, especially if you are enfolded
Speaker 1: in social media right because you earned them being served
Speaker 1: up even more and more stories of what's going on
Speaker 1: in culture, um when it has to do with crime. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, just think about your you know, your own
Speaker 1: interaction with social media and and crime. I mean, what
Speaker 1: happens when you hear gunshots in your neighborhood. If you
Speaker 1: ever have to to hear that, you're likely to what
Speaker 1: head over to the neighborhood association Facebook group and uh
Speaker 1: and see what everyone else is thinking. Did someone call
Speaker 1: it in? What is someone that you know? Where? Does
Speaker 1: someone think it occurred? That sort of thing? And then
Speaker 1: in the case of larger, large scale violent to acts,
Speaker 1: you know, acts of terrorism or what have you, you know,
Speaker 1: you end up heading like over to Twitter, see what's
Speaker 1: the you know, the current like breaking news about it, because,
Speaker 1: as we've seen, we often see accounts of traumatic events
Speaker 1: like this really breaking out on Twitter in real time
Speaker 1: right at the cutting edge of the story, often the
Speaker 1: unverified cutting edge of the story, where there hasn't been
Speaker 1: enough time to validate all the information coming in. So
Speaker 1: we have this huge ability to to live right there
Speaker 1: at the threshold of what's going on. Uh, to binge
Speaker 1: on the chaos, the disturbing details at times, the compassion,
Speaker 1: but also that the hate that spirals out across the
Speaker 1: social media following an occurrence like that, right, and what
Speaker 1: you're seeing there in those instances, this um was accretion
Speaker 1: really of social media and the responses is a kind
Speaker 1: of emotional contagion. And we've talked about this before, this
Speaker 1: idea that that anxiety is spreading throughout a network. And Uh,
Speaker 1: if only we had some sort of experiments, say a
Speaker 1: Facebook experiment we could point to and which they actually
Speaker 1: changed the algorithm and manipulated the feeds for people so
Speaker 1: that people either saw overwhelmingly positive stories and their newspeeds
Speaker 1: or overwhelmingly negative stories. Ah. Yes, we do have that data. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is great because there they're toying with the
Speaker 1: way that the media, in the form of Facebook can
Speaker 1: cultivate the users. Yeah, we're talking about In June of
Speaker 1: last year, Facebook did conduct an emotional contagion experiment on
Speaker 1: almost seven hundred thousand users, and they did, in fact
Speaker 1: manipulate their their news feeds, and what they saw is
Speaker 1: that those people producing fewer upbeating more negative expressions correlated
Speaker 1: with the negative stories that were in their news speed.
Speaker 1: And the reverse also held true, and researchers produced the
Speaker 1: number of negative posts visible. So you see this mean
Speaker 1: world syndrome at play really in the responses of the users.
Speaker 1: And of course this drew a lot of ire from
Speaker 1: people because they felt like they were being manipulated. They
Speaker 1: felt like Facebook was being shady. Uh, and perhaps they were,
Speaker 1: but I will say that you have more than eight
Speaker 1: hundred million people logging in every day. UM, that's usable
Speaker 1: scientific research, and so you can understand why Facebook and
Speaker 1: why scientists social scientists aren't interested in trying to dip
Speaker 1: into it, although their methods maybe we're less than desirable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's interesting though, how like the main headline for
Speaker 1: that story ended up being Facebook is experimenting on you
Speaker 1: without your knowledge, tying directly into some of those fears
Speaker 1: and worries we were talking about at the top of
Speaker 1: the podcast, the fear that that's so corporate and or
Speaker 1: government entity is is looking over your shoulder, manipulating something
Speaker 1: in your life. Um, as opposed to the ultimately the
Speaker 1: more disturbing idea of just how to what degree we
Speaker 1: are cultivated with to what degree our worldview in our
Speaker 1: minds and even our self reflection are cultivated by these, uh,
Speaker 1: these fonts of media. So my question here is, do
Speaker 1: you think at some point will become savvy enough that
Speaker 1: we understand that mean world syndrome is at play and
Speaker 1: things will equal out? In other words, uh, perceived threat
Speaker 1: versus real threat come a little bit closer to each other.
Speaker 1: I would hope. So, I mean that would certainly, I
Speaker 1: would hope. So it's it's not very encouraging given that
Speaker 1: this that cultivation theory has been around so long, you know,
Speaker 1: and it's there's not like a cultivation theory awareness button
Speaker 1: flashing in the corner of your screen when you've been
Speaker 1: on the same channel for too long or anything of
Speaker 1: that nature. Because I mean, also, it's kind of like, uh,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like preparing a bath, right, the media
Speaker 1: prepares a bath for you. They decide how much hot
Speaker 1: water goes in, how much cold water, and then you
Speaker 1: get into it and it feels all right, and you
Speaker 1: don't question it. You never stop to think, should I
Speaker 1: be bathing in a potter water or a colder bath. Well,
Speaker 1: especially with this medium, with TV, which has been around
Speaker 1: and kind of was stable for a long time, and
Speaker 1: then other types of media came on board, and then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden your access to information into fiction
Speaker 1: and nonfiction um exploded. So it is an interesting time
Speaker 1: right now. It will be interesting to see ten years
Speaker 1: from now what sort of studies come out of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean right now, especially with Facebook, And I
Speaker 1: think I mentioned this a bit in the some of
Speaker 1: the race episodes we're talking about, Like if you have
Speaker 1: kind of an an extreme opinion about anything, be at
Speaker 1: race related or not purely political, what what have you? Uh,
Speaker 1: you can find a place on Facebook, in social media,
Speaker 1: you can find a blog, You can find somewhere that
Speaker 1: will completely cultivate those ideas that you have. They won't
Speaker 1: question them, won't challenge you, and you can just you
Speaker 1: can use your retreat into that that particular abyss. And
Speaker 1: that's one of the strengths of social media and the
Speaker 1: Internet age. But it's uh, it's undeniably a weakness. Well,
Speaker 1: I think it appropriate to read a quote from George Girpner,
Speaker 1: who back in the day said, quote, our studies have
Speaker 1: shown that growing up from infancy with this unprecedented diet
Speaker 1: of TV violence has three consequences, which in combination I
Speaker 1: call the mean world syndrome. What this means is that
Speaker 1: if you are growing up in a home where there
Speaker 1: is more than say, three hours of television per day
Speaker 1: for all practical purposes, you live in a meaner world
Speaker 1: and act accordingly. Then your next door neighbor who lives
Speaker 1: in the same world but watches the US television the
Speaker 1: programming reinforces the worst fears and apprehensions and paranoia of people. There.
Speaker 1: You have it all right? Well, if hey, you want
Speaker 1: to check out more episodes of the podcast, you want
Speaker 1: to check out the landing page for this uh this
Speaker 1: particular episode with the links out to related content and
Speaker 1: outside content. Head on over to stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com. And if you have thoughts on the
Speaker 1: mean World syndrome or anything else, please do share those
Speaker 1: thoughts with us. You can do so by sending us
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