T HE R ISE OF L IMITED -E FFECTS T HEORY
C. WRIGHT MILLS AND THE POWER ELITE
Opposition to elite pluralism came from across the political spectrum. The debate in many ways foreshadowed the ferment over all forms of limited-effects theory that arose in the 1970s and 1980s. Most classical democratic theorists were of- fended by and disdainful of elite pluralism. They argued that if the present political system was not a true democracy, efforts should be made to move the system in that direction, however difficult. Either we should recapture the essence of democ- racy as envisioned by the Founders, or we should take steps to break the power of existing elites. To opponents, elite pluralism was a rationalization of the status quo providing no direction for future development.
In an era when respect for normative and grand social theories was declining, however, it was hard for classical democratic theorists to defend their views against a “scientific” theory like elite pluralism. During the Cold War, with the American political system seemingly locked in mortal combat with a ruthless totalitarian foe, it’s not surprising that people would find elite pluralism attractive. After all, it sug- gested that the American political system was stable and resilient, even if not per- fect. Maintaining this system didn’t require radical change, just some tinkering to make sure that various pluralistic groups were routinely co-opted into the system and that political elites were bound by informal rules stopping them from engaging in demagoguery.
The opposition to elite pluralism from the political left was spearheaded by C. Wright Mills, a Harvard sociologist and, as mentioned earlier, the man who served as field director for Lazarsfeld’s Decatur research project. Mills was well INSTANT ACCESS
Elite Pluralism
Strengths Weaknesses
1. Explains a stable U.S. social and political system
2. Is based on wealth of empirical data 3. Is a well-developed and cogent theory
1. Legitimizes an undemocratic view of U.S. politics
2. Goes well beyond empirical evidence for conclusions
3. Is too accepting of the status quo
4. Paints a negative picture of average people and their media use
aware of the limitations of theories based on empirical research. He wrote a book (1959) in which he castigated Lazarsfeld for engaging in what Mills termed
“abstracted empiricism.” He rejected the argument that elite pluralism was more sci- entific than other forms of political theory. Because of his knowledge of survey research, he was deeply skeptical of the data marshaled in its support. He argued that in American society, political power was not decentralized across a broad range of pluralistic groups. Instead, he believed that power was centralized in a small group of military-industrial-complex leaders, whom he called the power elite (1957).
This elite group was not at all representative of pluralistic groups. It was isolated from them and typically acted against their interests. “The ‘awesome means of power’ enthroned upon these monopolies of production, administration, and vio- lence included the power to prevent issues and ideas from reaching Congress in the first place,” Mills argued. Mills believed that “most Americans still believed the ebb and flow of public opinion guided political affairs” (Summers, 2006a, p. 39).
Instead, Mills urged, “But now we must recognize this description as a set of images out of a fairy tale…. They are not adequate even as an approximate model of how the American system of power works” (in Summers, 2006a, p. 39).
For a brief period in the early 1960s, the followers of Mills and Key were arrayed against each other. In this conflict, Key and his allies had many crucial advantages. Their research had larger and more secure funding from government agencies and private foundations. As such, elite pluralists successfully defended their claim of being more scientific. Ultimately, Mills brought his own perspective into question in the United States by backing Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba.
Then, in 1962, he was killed in a tragic motorcycle accident. Criticism of elite pluralism was soon muted as the nation focused its attention on Communist threats in Vietnam.
In The Power Elite and other books, Mills raised many disturbing questions about American politics. If elite pluralism was operating so effectively, why were so many minority groups receiving so little help? Why did average people feel so powerless and apathetic? Why did people choose to remain ignorant about poli- tics? Why did the same people serve over and over again as leaders of supposedly independent social institutions? Why were the interests of the few so often pursued at the expense of average people? Why did political parties and other social institu- tions make no determined efforts to educate people about their interests or to mobilize them to take actions that might serve those interests? Why did mass media tend to merely reinforce the status quo rather than inspire people to take action against race- and social-class-based discrimination? Mills proved prophetic, because these same issues surfaced a decade later as part of a broad-based chal- lenge to American social science and the American political system; these form the focus of Chapter 8.
A SUMMARY OF LIMITED-EFFECTS GENERALIZATIONS
The several views of media’s impact described in this chapter can be assembled into a broader, middle-range theory of limited effects. This perspective of the media’s power and influence is made up of several interrelated generalizations, and it has numerous limitations, which we have already discussed. We’ll consider some of
these limitations at greater length in the next chapter. But for now, these limited- effects generalizations are as follows:
1. The role of mass media in society is limited; media primarily reinforce existing social trends and only rarely initiate social change. The media will cause change only if the many barriers to their influence are broken down by highly unusual circumstances such as a terrorist attack or war. The empirical mass communication research discussed in this chapter supports this assumption.
Study after study found little evidence of strong media influence. Even evidence of reinforcement was often lacking.
2. Mass media’s role in the lives of individuals is limited, and although this role tends to be positive, it can occasionally be dysfunctional for some types of people.
Media provide a convenient and inexpensive source of entertainment and information. But neither use has much long-term or important impact on the daily life of most people. Almost all information is either ignored or quickly forgotten. Entertainment mainly provides a temporary distraction from work, allowing people to relax and enjoy themselves so that they can go back to work refreshed. People who are adversely affected by media tend to have severe personality or social adjustment problems; they would be deeply troubled even if media weren’t available. We’ll have more to say about this in the next chapter.
3. The role of mass media in the U.S. political and social system is
overwhelmingly positive. Although not democratic in the classic sense, the U.S.
system is nevertheless a viable and humane system that respects and nurtures cultural pluralism while preserving social order. Media play an important though somewhat minor role in supporting this system through their reinforcement of the status quo.
DRAWBACKS OF THE LIMITED-EFFECTS PERSPECTIVE
We’ve discussed many of the limitations of the limited-effects perspective in this chapter, but here they are briefly listed, accompanied by some new concerns.
1. Both survey and experimental research have serious methodological limitations not adequately recognized or acknowledged. Empirical researchers were anxious to popularize their approach and sometimes made exaggerated claims for it. Naive people outside the empirical research community made false assumptions about the power and usefulness of this type of research. When empirical researchers were directly challenged in the late 1960s, they were slow to acknowledge the limitations of their work and reacted defensively.
2. The methodological limitations of early empirical social research led to findings that systematically underestimated the influence of mass media for society and for individuals. Researchers like Lazarsfeld and Hovland were inherently cautious. They didn’t want to infer the existence of effects that might not be there—spurious effects. The researchers developed methods designed to guard against this, but they risked overlooking or dismissing evidence that could have been interpreted as an argument for significant media effects. In their conclusions, they often failed to emphasize that they might be overlooking many types of media effects because they had no way of
measuring them.
spurious effects A finding in a research study of a phenomenon that exists only in that study; a research artifact
3. Early empirical social research centered on whether media had immediate, powerful, direct effects; other types of influence were ignored. This focus was justified for two reasons. First, the mass society perspective and propaganda theories, which had been dominant, asserted that such effects existed and should be easy to observe. These perspectives needed to be evaluated, and the early limited-effects research did so. Second, the early research methods were best suited to studying immediate, direct effects—if researchers couldn’t “see”
an effect, it didn’t exist. Only later, as we’ll see in subsequent chapters, did researchers develop techniques that permitted other types of influence to be empirically assessed.
CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE LIMITED-EFFECTS PERSPECTIVE
1. The limited-effects perspective effectively supplanted mass society theory and the propaganda theories as the dominant perspective on media. This had both useful and problematic consequences. On the one hand, the limited-effects perspective reduced unjustified fears about massive uncontrollable media effects. This benefited media practitioners. Most important, it helped ease pressures for direct government censorship of media and permitted media practitioners to implement useful forms of self-regulation. On the other hand, it served to discourage attempts to systematically educate the public and foster critical thinking about the mass media. It dismissed such attempts as naive and impractical. Resources that might have been devoted to public education were diverted to mass communication research, where they were used to continue development of limited-effects theory.
2. The perspective prioritized empirical observation and downgraded more speculative forms of theory construction. It demonstrated the practicality and utility of empirical research and inspired development of a broad range of innovative methods for data collection as well as new techniques for data analysis. These empirical techniques have proved to be powerful and useful for specific purposes. If the perspective had not become dominant, scientists might not have devoted the time and resources necessary to develop these techniques.
3. Although the limited-effects perspective ultimately turned many established social scientists away from media study, it provided a useful framework for research conducted in universities and colleges during the 1950s and 1960s. In hindsight, we see that the perspective was, to some extent at least, a self-fulfilling prophecy. It asserted that media had no socially important effects. This belief was based on research findings provided by crude data collection and analysis methods. These methods can now be interpreted as having grossly
underestimated the influence of media by focusing too much attention on effects on individuals while ignoring other aspects of media’s role.
Unfortunately, by the time more sophisticated research techniques were developed, most social researchers in the established disciplines of sociology, psychology, and political science had stopped looking for important media effects. During the 1960s and 1970s, the work of mass communication researchers was viewed with considerable skepticism outside their field. What was there that we didn’t already know about the role of media? Quite a lot, as we shall see.
THE HOVLAND-LAZARSFELD LEGACY
The wealth of empirically based knowledge generated by persuasion and information-flow research and—possibly more important—the often conflicting, in- conclusive, and situationally specific research questions they inspired have occupied many communication researchers for decades. Together with the survey research findings produced by Lazarsfeld, this work challenged and ultimately undermined mass society theory and notions about the power of propaganda. Gerry Miller and Michael Burgoon acknowledged the powerful initial influence of this research when they commented regarding the Hovland work, “The classic volumes of the
‘Yale Group’ … were accorded a seminal status comparable to that conferred on the Book of Genesis by devoted followers of the Judeo-Christian religious faith”
(1978, p. 29). Similar remarks could have been made about the landmark study of information flow conducted by DeFleur and Larsen.
This body of work deserves recognition but not reverence. For its time, it was thorough, sophisticated, and groundbreaking—but it did not yield a definitive explanation of the role or power of media. With Lazarsfeld’s research, Hovland’s work spawned literally thousands of research efforts on and dozens of intellectual refinements of the process of mass communication. But now, more than half a cen- tury later, we have only begun to put this work into perspective and understand its limitations as well as its considerable merits. The beam cast by this research is nar- row; it fails to provide us with a broad understanding of media as it often high- lights trivial properties. Thus its contribution to our overall understanding of the role of mass media in the society at large was to some extent misleading. To the extent that we relied upon limited-effects notions about media power, we made crucial errors in understanding media.
SUMMARY
The 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast ushered in the limited-effects perspective. Development of this perspective was led by Paul Lazarsfeld and Carl Hovland and benefited from the refinement of empirical research methods, the failure of the mass society and propaganda thinkers to offer empirical evidence for their views, the commer- cial nature of the new research methods and their support by both government and business, and the spread of these methods to a wide variety of academic disciplines.
Lazarsfeld championed the inductive approach to theory construction and employed it in his 1940 voter studies and other research to develop the idea of a two-step flow of media influence.
With other research of the time, this helped de- velop the outlines of the limited-effects perspec- tive: Media rarely have direct effects; media
influence travels from media, through opinion lea- ders, to opinion followers; group commitments protect people from media influence; and when effects do occur, they are modest and isolated.
Hovland and other psychologists offered sup- port for this limited-effects view. Using con- trolled variation, they demonstrated that numerous individual differences and group af- filiations limited media’s power to change atti- tudes. This led logically to the development of dissonance theory, the idea that people work consciously and unconsciously to limit the influ- ence of messages running counter to their preex- isting attitudes and beliefs. This dissonance reduction operated through selectivity in expo- sure (attention), retention, and perception.
The work of Lazarsfeld and Hovland inspired other limited-effects thinking. Information-flow
theory studied media’s effectiveness in transmit- ting information to mass audiences. Klapper’s phenomenistic, or reinforcement, theory provided a powerful argument for media as reinforcers of the status quo, unable to have powerful effects.
Elite pluralism, forcefully argued by Key and forcefully challenged by Mills, also offered a be- nign perspective on media influence: As most peo- ple were not interested or intelligent enough to use media to form meaningful political attitudes, this ineffectiveness of media actually served the U.S.
social system by giving it its stability. As long as those who were more involved in or better at po- litical discourse could get the information they needed, all Americans would be served.
Together, these middle-range theories came to define the limited-effects perspective and shared these assumptions: Empirical research can be used to generate useful theory; the role of media in society is limited; sometimes media can be dys- functional for some types of individuals; and the U.S. social and political system is stable and fair.
But the limited-effects perspective has its draw- backs: Both surveys and experiments have seri- ous methodological limitations; these limitations consistently produced research findings that un- derestimated media’s influence; and “effects”
were defined as only those that were immediate and observable, ignoring other, possibly more important effects.
Critical Thinking Questions 1. Are you typically an opinion leader or an
opinion follower? Are there specific topics on which you are one or the other? Identify an issue (movies, music, sports, fashion, domes- tic politics) on which you can identify an- other whose opinion you usually seek. How well does that person fit the description of opinion leaders embodied in two-step flow?
Has membership in a social networking site such as Facebook or Twitter altered your role as an opinion leader or follower or that of any of your friends? How?
2. Klapper’s phenomenistic theory argues that media’s greatest power rests in their ability to reinforce existing attitudes and values. At the time, this was evidence that media had limited effects—they were limited to
reinforcement. But more contemporary thinking (as you’ll read in later chapters) sees reinforcement as anything but a limited ef- fect. Can you anticipate some of the argu- ments in support of this view?
3. Does the recent trend toward partisan media outlets herald a new era of minimal media effects? If so, what are the consequences?
Are we becoming a nation in which we no longer share common media but rely in- creasingly on media tailored to appeal to people who think and act like ourselves?
What about your own media use? What is your opinion of media outlets such as The Daily Show or Fox News or MSNBC that cater to specific audiences?
Key Terms limited-effects perspective inductive
middle-range theory gatekeepers
opinion leaders opinion followers
two-step flow theory indirect-effects theory limited-effects theory controlled variation individual differences social categories cognitive consistency
cognitive dissonance selective processes selective exposure selective retention selective perception information-flow theory
source-dominated theory
phenomenistic theory reinforcement theory elite pluralism spurious effects
C H A P T E R