Key Effects Research Theories
- Diffusion of Innovations
- Elaboration Likelihood Model
- Cultivation Studies
- Proposed by Gerber in 1976
- CT suggests that TV has a long term effect on the the viewer and will gradually affect the audience’s views and behaviors
- Children will carry beliefs that they acquire from TV through life and will affect beliefs that they have as adults
- Prosocial Behaviors
- Agenda Setting
- Framing
- Spiral of Silence
- Uses and Gratification
Critical/Rhetorical/Cultural Approaches to Propaganda & Persuasion
- Aristotle (Ethos/Logos/Pathos)
- Ethos
- depends on personal character of the speaker
- intent is to appear credible
- ex) clothing, social aspects, celebrity endorsments
- Pathos
- putting audience into certain frame of mind
- emotional influence
- Logos
- the proof provided by the words of the speech itself
- appeals towards logical reason
- Ethos
- Cicero ( 5 Canons of Rhetoric: Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, & Delivery)
- Kenneth Burke:
- Dramatism
- Direct route to human motives and emotions
- 5 elements – Act, Scene, Agency, Agent, Purpose
- Guilt Redemption – Plot of all human drama, root of all rhetoric
- Identification
- As humans we are born/exist as separate beings and we inherently seek to identify with others
- When someone attempts to persuade someone else, identification occurs because, for persuasion to occur, one party must “identify” with another
- Scapegoating
- blaming a group of people for an event or something that they may not have done. Recently we have had problems with ISIS and started putting blame on the entire Muslim community.
- Frames of Acceptance (Tragic & Comic)/Frames of Rejection
- Dramatism
- Collective Memory
- How the memory of the past shapes our present actions and emotions
- Ex) monuments remind us of past events in history and help us remember what happened and how we felt in that time (9/11)
- Polysemy- very similar to homophones
- “Bank”
- 1. financial institution
- 2. the building where a financial institution offers services
- 3. to rely upon “You can bank on me.”
- derived from the theme of security
- “river bank” would be a homophone because it is not related
- “Bank”