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

Abstract

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.

NOTES

Notes

1. This finding is consistent with previous research on object categorization, which finds that people naturally default to a basic level of abstraction, and that subcategories (such as those for more concrete construal) are not very different from this basic level in terms of the processes used (Rosch, 1999; Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976). More abstract categorization, however, involves more difficult processing to distinguish overlapping categories, and so is not likely to be the level people naturally use when engaged in categorization. This previous work provides some support for the idea that concrete construal may be the default in first-order cultivation judgments because of the ease of basic level processing.

2. We wish to thank one of the reviewers to pointing out this possibility so that we could test whether this might be the case.