Experimental insights into the socio-cognitive effects of viewing materialistic media messages on welfare support

ABSTRACT

This experimental study draws on cultivation, dispositional materialism, and schema theories to test the effects of commercial media viewing on material values and welfare support. Data were collected from a cross-sectional British sample using a web-survey priming methodology (N = 487, ages 18–49). Findings suggest that (a) materialism and anti-welfare orientations operate through associated and contiguous cognitive-affective mechanisms that can be triggered by momentary exposure to materialistic media messages (MMMs). (b) Heavy consumers of television shows that valorize and regularly portray wealth, fame, and luxury are significantly more materialistic and anti-welfare than lighter consumers. (b) Chronic attention to MMMs may indirectly increase support for the governmental enactment of punitive welfare policies via cultivating self-enhancement related schemas, which when instantiated, decrease dispositional orientations toward empathy, altruism, and communality. This research contributes nuanced theoretical and experimental insights into how ubiquitous commercial media potentially undermine prosocial development and societal well-being.

Acknowledgments

I thank Dr. Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington, Professor Tim Kasser, Professor Francesca Carpentier, and the anonymous peer-reviewers for helping me to craft this article.

Notes

1 An experimental study by Shrum et al. (2011), for example, found that materialism may be partly cultivated by actively engaging with compelling media narratives that explicitly tie wealth and luxury to happiness. The researchers posited that the more a given media narrative captivates and transports a viewer, the likelier this is to activate high-end elaboration central route cognitive processes and thus influence stable values and attitudes.

2 This broadly refers to the automatic bias toward self-enhancement values, attitudes, and practices (Kasser, 2016).

3 For example, approval for increasing taxes to fund benefits for low-income people fell from 61% in 1989 to 27% in 2009, and remained relatively low at 30% in 2014. Additionally, support for increasing unemployment benefits fell from 35% in 1984 to 7% in 2007, and rose only slightly to 13% in 2014 (Taylor & Taylor-Gooby, 2015). What makes these figures especially perplexing is that, during this same period, the United Kingdom has experienced rapidly growing socioeconomic inequalities, wage disparities, precarious and underemployment rates, and living costs (Dorling, 2014; Wiggan, 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Middlesex University School of Law.