Television and personal threat: fact or artifact? A British survey

Following analyses of public survey data in the United States, Gerbner and his associates found that people who watch a great deal of television are more likely to show social anxiety and mistrust of others than are less frequent viewers. On this evidence they argued that television cultivates fearfulness and alienation. However, previous research on related social beliefs indicated that they may be a function of deep‐seated personality dispositions of individuals associated with more general social conditions — one such factor being Rotter's internal‐external control dimension. As other writers have shown ( a ) that social anxiety and anomie vary among different social groups and ( b ) that controls for demographic factors often significantly weaken relationships between viewing behaviour and social opinion, it is possible that both extent of viewing and fearfulness/mistrust are a function of some third variable — perhaps an underlying personality characteristic. To test this, data were collected from a British sample of over 300 individuals in the London ITV region on television viewing habits, fearfulness and anomie, and locus of control. Results showed that whilst fear of being a victim of crime correlated significantly with television viewing initially, this relationship disappeared when the influence of internal‐external control was partialled out. It was concluded that belief items used by Gerbner may be less robustly related to viewing behaviour than the factor measured by locus‐of‐control items and may offer a powerful alternative explanation for the relationship between television viewing and paranoid social perceptions.