What Do You Think?

[troach]

nothing really new they have been saying variations of this for years.
but a little more prof of the realities of garbage in garbage out.


copied from:
http://www.canada.com/entertainment/story.html?id=4951257



Stupid is as stupid watches, says study on media and thinking


By Misty Harris
Postmedia News
June 15, 2011

Warning: the mindless summer movies, books and television you're enjoying may be harmful to your intellectual health.

A new study suggests that when people don't think critically about their media consumption, they're in danger of assimilating some of the mental characteristics on display. Specifically, researchers found that if the main character in a screenplay was a total imbecile, and people weren't expressly asked to identify differences between themselves and that protagonist, the participants' own cognitive skills were compromised.

In other words, stupidity appears to be contagious — if only temporarily.

"It's not like a disease, where once you have it, you have it for a long time; we're not saying you'll be impaired the day after reading a stupid story or watching TV," says study author Markus Appel, an associate professor at Johannes Kepler University of Linz in Austria. "But we do show that performance in knowledge tests is susceptible to fictional characters."

Just as video games put players at the centre of the action, Appel says storytelling implicitly asks people to identify with the characters on some level. And just as video games have been (controversially) linked to behaviour, stories can have a transformative effect on people's thinking.

"People are scared of being influenced by aggressive content but there are many other things to consider," says Appel. "There's much more to narratives than just entertainment."

In experiments with 81 people, Appel had different groups read a screenplay that featured either a protagonist whose intellectually abilities were undetermined or one in which the star was an alcoholic, aggressive and intellectually feeble soccer hooligan (think Europe's answer to the cast of Jersey Shore).

Half of those given the latter story were directed to think about ways in which they differed from the protagonist, while the others were given no such instruction before reading the tale.

Afterward, all participants took a general knowledge test, and those who read the story about the idiotic thug did significantly worse, on average, than those who read the story in which the main character's intellect wasn't addressed. The exception was the group that was asked to actively think about the imbecilic character's traits — a process Appel says kept the contagion effect from occurring, and ultimately underscored the value of critical thinking.

Of course, general knowledge isn't akin to IQ. But the findings are consistent with a wide swath of studies showing that people are subtly but significantly influenced by environmental cues.

Jennifer Pozner, a media literacy advocate, says some of the most powerful evidence of this comes from research related to advertising.

"Intelligence and savvy don't inoculate us," says Pozner, author of Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV. "In fact, a lot of the time, advertising works better when we think we're above it. Because if we think we're immune, we turn off our critical thinking mechanism and just zone out."

Taken together, she says the latest study findings — which appear in the journal Media Psychology — and previous research on media effects aren't necessarily arguments against superficial entertainment, but rather arguments against being passive receptacles for what's on offer.

"The danger of (imbecilic) depictions isn't in the watching of them," says Pozner. "It's in the lack of thinking about them."