Mean World Syndrome

Used to it was alien abductions though when I was when I was like a junior high kid, I was terrified of alien abductions. And then I went through like a one week phase or maybe it was a month in high school where I was terrified of car rex Like I was just convinced that if my family got in a car, we'd go out. You know, we're driving to look at Christmas lights, and I was like, this is a needless rest. We were clearly all going to perish.

And then it passed. Is this because you had seen some some sort of public service announcement driving I bet so I imagine that both of these fears were directly related to the stuff that I was absorbing, be it unsolved mysteries in the case of the alien abductions, or yes, some special about highway safety in the case of the

vehicle fear. And you know now that I think about it, when I was around eight years old, I saw a documentary on an atom bomb, and I remember having nightmares about being with my family on a cliff and watching the sun melt and everything around me just perish. Um. So, yeah, I think if you guys are listening alone, you're going to start to see this link here between media consumption

and how it informs our fears. Indeed, we're talking about something called mean world syndrome, which is which is a fascinating theory they were going to unwrap for you here, and it it really God, it's really really gets its tentacles into just about everything in our daily life. It does.

And before we explore that a bit more, we want to thank listener Joseph who wrote us about our episode The Dark and sent us a link to a survey about what Americans fear most, which kicked off this whole exploration of the mean world syndrome, which in which there is also a documentary. It's a two thousand and ten documentary, and we thought we would just pull a couple of quotes from it. Yeah. This comes from George Gebner, professor of communications and founder of cultivation theory UM, died in

two thousand five. He says, most of us live rather insulated lives, and we don't meet too many people of other groups, of other races, other ethnic backgrounds than our own. Most of what we know about other races, other ethnic groups we know from television, and from television we get

some very peculiar types of information. Now they interview a bunch of other people, including Michael Morgan and marsh mcclehen, who said, on the difficulty of measuring the effect of media on views perceptions quote, it's like the fish in the water. We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish. A pervasive medium, a pervasive environment is always beyond perception end quote. So that I

think is the underlying conundrum here. We know that we're consuming media, UM, we know that we're consuming a lot more than we used to and in various different ways, but we're not entirely sure of the effects, but we do have Gardner's research to give us a clue of houses actually informing our worldview. Yeah, in worldview here is key because because we've hit on many times in this podcast, Uh,

reality is different for everyone. There's certainly the subjective reality and an objective reality, but everyone's worldview is a little different, and everyone's everyone's model of reality in which we house ourselves you a little different and what what we build it out? After? What degree does media play into our construction of this particular world? Does objectivity really exist when you're trying to filter information through your own experiences and ideas?

And that's a bit of what we'll get into today. But first we want to talk about this two thousand and fourteen Chapman University survey and it was a nationwide year long survey by the way UM. It was a poll of fifteen hundred Americans concerning their fears and concerns. And Dr Christopher Bator, who led this effort, said, what we learned through this initial survey that we had to phrase the questions according to fear versus concerned to capture

the information correctly. So that's how we are presenting it, and indeed that is how they parse it out. And the reason for that is because fear and worry, although very closely related, have a kind of temporal difference, at least in my mind, uh it does. Fear feels immediate and worrying feels like a sort of existential threat, something that might happen in the in the future, whereas fear as the immediate future. Yeah, worry has kind of, you know,

a certain amount of inevitability about it. I find like I worry about the things that will come to pass or may come to pass. But fear are sort of the the oddball things that might pop up on the on the on the dice roll of life, you know, the more random things. Right. Yeah. So top five things that Americans fear the most. This is what came out of this survey. The number one fear walking alone at night okay, very primal, okay. Number two becoming the victim

of identity theft, very modern. Number three safety on the internet. Number four being the victim of a mass or random shooting, which ties to what you said in terms of fear and fear acts of randomness, right, And number five sticking out like a sore thumb in this list. Public speaking, That's that seems kind of crazy to me, because like, I'm not a fan of public speaking. I kind of view it it's kind of like vomiting while I'm doing it.

I dislike it, But I don't spend the rest of my life worrying about the neck or fearing the next time I'm going to vomit or have to speak publicly, Like, yeah, it's going to happen. What can I do about it? And you feel spent afterward? Right, You feel like you've got a blank slate to build upon. Um. But yeah, I think that speaks a lot to how much people really dislike getting up and talking in front of other people. And I was thinking about that, was like, what does

that mean. That means that they're afraid of failing and they're afraid of being judged, And that all makes sense. But then I thought why, though, why so? Why so common a fear? And I thought, I wonder if it's because in this day and age, public speaking isn't just speaking to two people in the room. It is now one person who is recording the video of it and putting it online so that two million other people can

see it and judge you. So just recording a video for YouTube could be considered public speaking, Yes, I think I think that it could be considered that way. It's just who is my audience? What are they going to think of me? Am I going to fail or succeed at this? But that's that's of interest. But what about worry or concern? All right? Well, the Chapman Survey for

worrying and concern breaks it down as follows. Number one having identity stolen on the Internet, number two corporate surveillance of Internet activity, number three running out of money in the future for government surveillance of Internet activity, and number

five becoming ill or sick. So here we see kind of another lopsided array of things here, because becoming ill and sick, that's timeless like and reasonable that we're all going to worry about what's going to happen when some illness hits us, perhaps something we have little or no ability to uh to to prevent um. And then running out of money in the future, I think we can all relate to that to some point or another. You know that, what to what extent will I not be

able to feed myself? How's myself feed myself, feed the people I love. How's the people I love in the future. Yeah, and again this list feels more incremental than immediate. Yeah, it's like what will what will it be like for my future self? Will that will my future self have to deal with these various things. Whereas those fears like the two that caught out to me the most walking alone at night, Uh, certainly in safety on the internet, Like those are two that do you think about all

the time when you're when you're in those environments. I don't know if I would say I outright have fear about safety on the internet, but certainly walking down the dark street, I mean, you just can't help it, but fear a little feel a little apprehensive. Well in terms of internet security too and finances. I feel like it's a given these days that at some point your information is going to be accessed or compromised. So I can

see how that's also in the minds of people. Another thing that the survey revealed, And remember the survey covered only people, so the survey isn't exhaustive, but it did reveal that a decent amount of people who were surveyed exhibit magical thinking. So more specifically, these sort of causal relationships between actions and events that are not based on

reason and observation. So, for example, in this study, more than of participants believe that Bigfoot is a real creature, about half believe that Satan causes most evil in the world. Pin it on Satan, Okay, and uh think they can influence the world with physical thought. I eat positive thoughts

all of the book The Secret. So this one is a little trickier though, right, because as you had pointed out earlier when we were talking about this, do they go specifically into like what do they mean by effect things with positive thoughts? Because there's, um, you know, one column where it's like, yeah, I think I'm gonna do great on this test. I'm well prepared. I'm gonna just harness my positivity, and the other one is I'm just gonna stare at the answers and by magical thinking, I'm

going to get the right one. Yeah, there's there's certainly a difference between just going into something with a positive mindset and trying to manifest uh situations in life just through pure thought. Um, it's interesting. I would I would certainly, you know, I certainly believe in that to a certain extent um, you know, just the power of positive thinking on the whole Satan Bigfoot thing. I actually think most of the evil caused in the world is due to

big Foot. So I actually that's where I fall in that line. Do you think you think he's kind of like the shadow of Satan character? Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think he's Satan's furry agent on Earth. All right. So, I think what this data is bareing out or are bearing is that when it comes to cold, hard calculation about the physical world around us, we're not always engaging in critical objective thought. And this is when perception can falter exactly, and it falters along lines that have nothing

to do with you know, skunk gates and devils. Uh. The Chapman survey here also found that the majority of majority of Americans not only actively fear crimes like child abduction, gang violence, sexual assault, and an other sort of you know, often sensationalized crimes of this this nature, they also believe these crimes had increased over the past twenty years. Now. This is particularly interesting when you look at statistical data from police and FBI records that actually showed that crime

has decreased in America over the past two decades. The fact that that often often gets criminologists in trouble when they when they start pointing these these facts out when they say, I mean that the crime rate has actually gone down, no matter what it feels like. And certainly you know if you if you, if your life has been touched by by violent crime of one type or another, that that that those those statistics are going to seem

less reliable. But likewise, what you have, what if your life hasn't been directly touched by this violence, but you simply are privy to it on a daily basis through your consumption of media. Well, and I think what colors this perception to that violence has gone up is that you often hear the that the United States, of all the developed countries, has one of the highest homicide rates.

And then if you look at an FBI two thousand and eleven statistic of the more than twelve thousand homicides, you'll see that seventy of them were caused by firearms. It was homicide by firearms. So it kind of there's there's a there's an actual support of real threat there. But then there's the overall statistics which would tell you on a day to day basis us that crime has actually decreased. So it gets kind of sticky with this,

especially when you bring firearms into the equation. And if you guys are interested in that, um, we encourage you to check out the article from The Atlantic. It's called quote gun Violence in America, the thirteen key questions with thirteen concercise answers. It's by Jonathan Straight And that'll give you a bit more information on the gun factor, which is very nuanced, complex and more than we can bite

off in this particular episode. Yeah, and I'll include a link to that article on the landing page for this

episode is stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Alright. So, some of the other contributing factors to perceived fear, according to the Chapman University survey, is that people with lower levels of education will exhibit significantly higher levels of fear regarding a bunch of stuff like personal safety, their future, running out of money, getting sick, Internet usage again, identity, theft, criminal victimization, government, the fear of government being oppressive, and

so on and so forth, immigration, natural disasters, and man made disasters. And they found that watching television talk shows in particular UH with a high frequency was strongly related to fear, and not surprisingly, a studied diet of two crime true crime TV shows affects level of fear and individuals. And they have just more and more data on this. If you want to check it out, The actually break down fear factors into gender, political affiliation, race, and so

on and so forth. So if you want to see more about that, definitely check out the University of Chapman's Fear Survey of Americans. And the reason we we brought out all of this data for you guys is that we felt like it was a good basis to explore the overall concept of mean world syndrome. Yes, mean world syndrome,

which stems from cultivation theory. Now, cultivation theory is a social theory developed by George Gebner, who we mentioned earlier and Larry Gross from the University of Pennsylvania in the mid nineties sixties, and it examines the long term effects of television. So in essence, the idea here is that

TV is cultivating our culture. UH think of you know, Shepherd Fairies, Obey graff d. I think of John Carpenter as they live with the the the the the the glasses that reveal what television is really informing onto the minds of the public um. And you have a pretty good idea about what's going on here. The TV is feeding your brain. It's informing our minds, both explicitly and implicitly on who and what we are, what sort of world we live in. So it's cultivating the viewers conceptions

of social reality. Now, Groner and Gross study television programming for twenty two years, and each year they randomly selected a week in real hoarded prime time programming as well as children's weekend programming, and they identify the quantity of violence and programs, and they found them to be pretty stable overtime. For instance, dramas that feature violence averaged five

violent acts per viewing hour. However, they found some inequalities in victimhood, with older people, women, and minorities particularly at risk in these acts of violence. So even though minorities were underrepresented on television, when they did appear, they were

much more likely to be victims of violence. Now, to analyze the effects of the violence on the minds of the participants of Governor and Gross correlated the data from the content analysis of television were survey data from people who were classified based on the amount of time they spent watching TV. So of course you've got two groups here, heavy watchers of TV four plus hours and light watchers less than two hours. And using a survey he targeted

four attitudes. So the first one was chances of involvement with violence. So what they found is that light viewers predicted their weekly odds of being involved in violence or something like one in one hundred, while heavy viewers said it was more like one in ten. Then the second attitude was fear of walking alone at night. Women were more afraid than men, but both sexes who were heavy viewers overestimated criminal activity, believing it to be ten times

more than figures actually indicate. The third was perceived activity of police. Heavy viewers believe that about five percent of societies involved with law enforcement, and in comparison, the light viewers thought it looks like one which is about right and general mistrust of people. That's the fourth attitude. People who were heavy viewers tended to see other people's actions

and motives more negatively. And if you drill down a little bit further into griner and grasses work, you'll find that they were looking at these very specific behaviors emerging, and they define them as mainstreaming, which is the process by which heavy viewing of television resulted in the similarity of perspective among viewers. And it didn't matter what they're their socio economic class was, or their education, those who

were heavy TV viewers had this perspective. They all shared that there's a sort of mainstreaming of what they thought was going on. And then something called resonance, which was that if someone had a real life violent incident that happened to them, well, that was amplifying their experience and making it feel like it was more prevalent. And certainly the yeah, the resonance residence makes perfect sense. You have

something like this, it touches your real life. It's going to completely color your perception of reality, even and even the even the news that you happen to catch on in the evening. Yeah, because you could in effect be experiencing that over and over again via these different situations, whether it's a report on the news or it's um some sort of c s i UH scenario. But the thing about this mean world syndrome is that it is not just about violence, it actually extends out further into

the world. It's tendrils go a bit more into the social fabric. Indeed, yeah, I mean it's not television is not a media or not only cultivating our ideas about about what's going on in the world. They're cultivating our ideas about what what the human species is, what what our bodies should look like. Um. There's a two thousand three paper that was published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence titled the Effect of thin ideal television commercials

on Body dissatisfaction and schema activation during early adolescence. So, in this study, they presented two groups of girls with different sets of ads. One set had undernourished women in it and the other set did not. They exposed both groups of girls to these ads and the results the girls who saw the ads with the emaciated models experienced

immediate episodes of insecurity and distress about their weight. What's more, two years later, the same girls still reported greater dissatisfaction with their bodies as compared to the other group of girls who didn't have to witness the emaciated models in the commercials. So the idea here is the continued exposure to unrealistic body types in the in the media affected the girls perceptions about what a normal, healthy, human female

body looks like. Again, the media is cultivating our understanding of reality, and in this case, it's cultivating our ideas about what your body should look like. That's fascinating to me. So over a number of years, this database gets built up in your mind about what is normal, when in fact, if you look at the normal statistics for proportions and women,

it's nothing like what is represented in media. Yeah, so it's it's it's not not only the outer world that is that is skewed, but it's also the inner world. It's both looking out and looking inward. Uh, you end up with unrealistic expectations about what's gonna happen. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break. When we get back, we are going to talk more about the lovers that

we're pulling here with this meanworld syndrome. Alright, we're back. Um. You know, in all of this, I kept thinking about the television series Sons of Anarchy, which I think I mentioned previously. Just in the space of a month sort of been want bench watched the entire run of the show like seven series seasons of it, and the whole time, I was just really struck by how violent the show is.

And I'm I'm kind of I'm used to violent shows, but I think the based on some some online staff, I was looking at the members of the biker gang in this series kill a hundred and fifty three people in the main care Jack's teller, who you're supposed to be the most sympathetic towards throughout the show, kills forty six people here in the course of the show, like every episode has some sort of horrible, cold blooded murder in it and uh, and so I just kept thinking, like,

what is this? What is this doing to me? You know what? How is this affecting my awareness? And and am I more afraid of Outlaw Motorcycle Club now than I was in the past? I don't know. You know, That's how I felt with Breaking Bad. Um. I love that series, but it was really hard to watch and it gave me the sense that the world is a rotten, stinking thing. And that's why I like to watch you Gaba Gabba. It's a lot more positive and uh, and it's easier to binge watch the entire the entire run

of the show and it's got great music too, exactly. Um. In terms of binge watching, uh, this is an interesting area when especially talking about cultivation theory and mean world syndrome, because I mean, binge watching has been around for a while, but though not in name, uh, for a while, it's been possible to get the entire run of a series

and just throw yourself into it. For a while, it's been possible to go to the video Stongeres were in a bunch of stuff and watch it before they can lose yourself in in in a book, in a comic book, what have you. But in recent years we've seen been binge watching pushed as an acceptable and even uh preferable model of media consumption. Netflix puts out you know, all of the new season of the House of Cards and you and you can just watch all of it, just

lose yourself in the show. Or Amazon Prime i think, follows the same model with some of their shows that have come out, which is really enjoyable. I have to say I'm not slamming it, because it can be really great to lose yourself in the show and just and not have to wait after each cliffhanger On the other hand, it's normalizing this sort of binge watching behavior that we

might not have all engaged in before. And if you've got ten different series chewed up that you're binge watching, that's a lot of consumption of these various world models. And uh so it's, like I said, it's a new area for the most part. So there hasn't been a lot of research done on binge watching and what it's doing to us. But there was a two thousand fifteen studied by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, and they found that the more lonely and depressed you are,

the more likely you are to binge watch. They conducted a survey on three hundred sixteen eighteen to twenty nine year olds on how often they watched TV, how often they had feelings of loneliness, depression, and self regulation deficiency, and finally how often they binge watched television. They found that the more lonely and depressed you are, the more likely you are to binge watch television. And an attempt to distance yourself from what's troubling you, you know, to

escape from your fears and escape from your anxieties. And UH and simply become one with the fictional world. And as with a lot of binge behavior, loneliness to press and self regulation deficiency are all key factors here. So again, you dived into the deep end of the TV pool in order to forget what's bothering you. Now back to the question though, is it harmful? Right? Because, as we said,

doesn't feel harmful when you're engaging in it. Um. This is where the researchers from the University of Texas at Austin argue that you have all these other factors that are potentially setting in physical fatigue, higher propensity for obesity, as well as other health concerns UH factor and potential work neglect, potential relationship neglect, and you have a potentially destructive cycle on your hands. Now, imagine that if all you ever watched, you binge watched was true crime TV.

Okay a can you would have this sense that this was a rotten, stinking world And and a follow up of sorts to Gripner and Grosses true crime TV watching, Glenn Sparks and Susan Helsing at Pretty University surveyed one hundreds and three jury eligible adults about their TV watching habits. They found that the heavy TV crime viewers estimated two and a half times more real world deaths due to

murder than non viewers of this type of television. So that that's a statistic that would really tell you that the mindsets of people are being colored, particularly when they are engaging in this type of TV, which over and over again you see these terrible crime scenes, these crimes

that have been perpetuated against people, a lot of women. Um. And then the other thing that they found again that that that Gardner and Gross had found, was that heavy true crime TV watchers misjudged the number of law enforcement officers and attorneys in the total workforce. So lawyers, police they each make up about less than one percent of workforce, but those surveyed estimated it at more than six and

eight respectively. Yeah, because you end up just consuming, first of all, some of the worst stories out there about about what happens in the course of human life. And then and then just my this focusing on all the details of the criminal investigation, and many times they're going to be a high profile case that's covered in these shows too, where it's going to have an unrealistic portrayal of how many people show up at a crime scene,

what kind of resources are leveled. It's it's solving it. Yeah, and Sparks and Helsing also found that the True crime TV watchers were also more likely to be fearful about

walking alone in a city at night. Of course, right you're watching True crime TV, um and it reminds me of the episode we did about phobias, and we were talking about spiders, and if I'm recalling this correctly, in one of the experiments, those people who were identified as having serious phobias about spiders were asked to draw the spiders and try to figure out the dimensions. And what they found in those people with the really high phobias

of spiders is that their dimensions were huge. They were largely outsized compared to the actual realistic dimensions of the spider. But those who didn't have the phobia had the more or less correct dimensions of the spider. And I think about this. I think this is like the spider in the brain of fear just expanding out in people who

are on a steady diet of this type of TV. Yeah. Yeah, you end up in a situation where you think, every time I step out the door, I'm potentially going to be assaulted or thrown into a van, uh, targeted by a serial murder, etcetera. Well, especially if you are enfolded in social media right because you earned them being served up even more and more stories of what's going on in culture, um when it has to do with crime. Yeah, I mean, just think about your you know, your own

interaction with social media and and crime. I mean, what happens when you hear gunshots in your neighborhood. If you ever have to to hear that, you're likely to what head over to the neighborhood association Facebook group and uh and see what everyone else is thinking. Did someone call it in? What is someone that you know? Where? Does

someone think it occurred? That sort of thing? And then in the case of larger, large scale violent to acts, you know, acts of terrorism or what have you, you know, you end up heading like over to Twitter, see what's the you know, the current like breaking news about it, because, as we've seen, we often see accounts of traumatic events like this really breaking out on Twitter in real time right at the cutting edge of the story, often the

unverified cutting edge of the story, where there hasn't been enough time to validate all the information coming in. So we have this huge ability to to live right there

at the threshold of what's going on. Uh, to binge on the chaos, the disturbing details at times, the compassion, but also that the hate that spirals out across the social media following an occurrence like that, right, and what you're seeing there in those instances, this um was accretion really of social media and the responses is a kind of emotional contagion. And we've talked about this before, this

idea that that anxiety is spreading throughout a network. And Uh, if only we had some sort of experiments, say a Facebook experiment we could point to and which they actually changed the algorithm and manipulated the feeds for people so that people either saw overwhelmingly positive stories and their newspeeds or overwhelmingly negative stories. Ah. Yes, we do have that data. Yeah, and this is great because there they're toying with the way that the media, in the form of Facebook can

cultivate the users. Yeah, we're talking about In June of last year, Facebook did conduct an emotional contagion experiment on almost seven hundred thousand users, and they did, in fact manipulate their their news feeds, and what they saw is that those people producing fewer upbeating more negative expressions correlated with the negative stories that were in their news speed. And the reverse also held true, and researchers produced the

number of negative posts visible. So you see this mean world syndrome at play really in the responses of the users. And of course this drew a lot of ire from people because they felt like they were being manipulated. They felt like Facebook was being shady. Uh, and perhaps they were, but I will say that you have more than eight

hundred million people logging in every day. UM, that's usable scientific research, and so you can understand why Facebook and why scientists social scientists aren't interested in trying to dip

into it, although their methods maybe we're less than desirable. Yeah, it's it's interesting though, how like the main headline for that story ended up being Facebook is experimenting on you without your knowledge, tying directly into some of those fears and worries we were talking about at the top of the podcast, the fear that that's so corporate and or government entity is is looking over your shoulder, manipulating something

in your life. Um, as opposed to the ultimately the more disturbing idea of just how to what degree we are cultivated with to what degree our worldview in our minds and even our self reflection are cultivated by these, uh, these fonts of media. So my question here is, do you think at some point will become savvy enough that we understand that mean world syndrome is at play and things will equal out? In other words, uh, perceived threat versus real threat come a little bit closer to each other.

I would hope. So, I mean that would certainly, I would hope. So it's it's not very encouraging given that this that cultivation theory has been around so long, you know, and it's there's not like a cultivation theory awareness button flashing in the corner of your screen when you've been on the same channel for too long or anything of that nature. Because I mean, also, it's kind of like, uh, it's kind of like preparing a bath, right, the media

prepares a bath for you. They decide how much hot water goes in, how much cold water, and then you get into it and it feels all right, and you don't question it. You never stop to think, should I be bathing in a potter water or a colder bath. Well, especially with this medium, with TV, which has been around and kind of was stable for a long time, and then other types of media came on board, and then all of a sudden your access to information into fiction

and nonfiction um exploded. So it is an interesting time right now. It will be interesting to see ten years from now what sort of studies come out of it. Yeah, because I mean right now, especially with Facebook, And I think I mentioned this a bit in the some of the race episodes we're talking about, Like if you have kind of an an extreme opinion about anything, be at

race related or not purely political, what what have you? Uh, you can find a place on Facebook, in social media, you can find a blog, You can find somewhere that will completely cultivate those ideas that you have. They won't question them, won't challenge you, and you can just you can use your retreat into that that particular abyss. And that's one of the strengths of social media and the

Internet age. But it's uh, it's undeniably a weakness. Well, I think it appropriate to read a quote from George Girpner, who back in the day said, quote, our studies have shown that growing up from infancy with this unprecedented diet of TV violence has three consequences, which in combination I

call the mean world syndrome. What this means is that if you are growing up in a home where there is more than say, three hours of television per day for all practical purposes, you live in a meaner world and act accordingly. Then your next door neighbor who lives in the same world but watches the US television the programming reinforces the worst fears and apprehensions and paranoia of people. There.

You have it all right? Well, if hey, you want to check out more episodes of the podcast, you want to check out the landing page for this uh this particular episode with the links out to related content and outside content. Head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. And if you have thoughts on the mean World syndrome or anything else, please do share those

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