In Search of the Predictors of the “Mean World Syndrome” and Political Moderation: A Replication of the Cultivation Research

Abstract

Responding to the emerging call of replicating influential research projects, with five rounds of U.S. data (1995-2017) from the World Value Survey, this study tests the main findings, the “mean world syndrome” and “mainstreaming” hypotheses, of the original cultivation theory research. Both the Gamma tests and the binary logistical regressions, which control the demographic and socioeconomic variables, confirm both hypotheses with some data that measure TV viewing in a certain way. The apparent contributions of education to social trust and of subjective social status to political moderation are noticed. Possible causes for television viewing’s negative impacts on social trust, compared with newspaper reading’s positive one, which is a robust finding in several threads of researches, is the difference in the verbal and audio-visual information processing.