Passive Learning: When the Media Environment Is the Message

This article investigates the phenomenon of “passive learning,” or how people may acquire information from the mass media despite lacking the motivation to do so. A unique data source allows us to overcome the “saturation effect” that generally makes the study of this phenomenon difficult. Saturation conditions commonly occur because exposure to political programming is virtually universal. With interest controlled, two groups receiving different media messages are compared over two elections. Those who had no interest in an election, but who lived in a media-rich environment were 40 percentage points more likely to have acquired information than their uninterested cohorts living in a media-poor environment.