Risky Business

I encourage readers to consider the broader implications of the media paradox. With practice, we may learn to protect ourselves from the subtle biases that pervade popular media reports, but does this go far enough? One's own critical thinking habits will provide insufficient protection against ill-advised policy decisions based upon prevailing misconceptions that have spread through the mass media. As spelled out in the experimental work of Shanto Iyengar (Iyengar 1991; Iyengar and Kinder 1987), media effects on ordinary citizens' political judgments raise grave concerns about the stability of a democratic system that rests upon a well-informed public.

John Ruscio, Ph.D., is a social psychologist in the Department of Psychology, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA 17022-2298. His research interests are in the areas of statistical methodology in behavioral research and the psychology of judgment and decision making His e-mail address is: rusciojp@acad. etown.edu.

Notes

(1.) This example is adapted from Nisbett, Borgida, Crandall, and Reed (1976).

(2.) In order to control for the possibility that the face-to-face condition achieved a large effect by providing critical information not contained in the statistical summary, a replication of this experiment included a condition in which the base rate group received--in addition to the statistical summary--a complete written transcript of the panelists' comments. This new condition was also less influential in affecting students' preferences than was the face-to-face condition (Borgida and Nisbett 1977).

(3.) This is not simply a result of each newspaper reporting deaths in accordance with the actual frequencies of occurrence. For example, homicides were reported three times as often as deaths by diseases despite the fact that diseases killed about 100 times as many people.

References

Bach, Richard. 1973. Nothing by chance. The American Way 6: 32-38.

Borgida, Eugene, and Richard E. Nisbett. 1977. The differential impact of abstract vs. concrete information on decisions. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 7: 258-271.

Combs, Barbara, and Paul Slovic. 1979. Causes of death: Biased newspaper coverage and biased judgments. Journalism Quarterly 56: 837-843.

"Death Odds." 1990. Newsweek, 24 September.

Gilovich, Thomas. 1991. How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: Free Press.

Iyengar, Shanto. 1991. Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Iyengar, Shanto, and Donald R. Kinder. 1987. News That Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lichtenstein, Sarah, Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, Mark Layman, and Barbara Combs. 1978. Judged frequency of lethal events. Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Learning and Memory 4: 551-578.

Nisbett, Richard E., Eugene Borgida, Rick Crandall, and Harvey Reed. 1976. Popular induction: Information is not necessarily informative. In J. S. Carroll and J. W. Payne (Eds.), Cognition and Social Behavior. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.