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This study asked five groups of respondents (including high school students, college students, and rail commuters) for percentage estimates of demographic and sex-stereotyped occupational categories. These estimates were compared with U.S. Census data for, and television representation of, the same categories. results indicate that the groups of respondents are similar in their misperceptions of social reality as defined by census data and that TV also distorts reality, but that respondents' distortions and TV distortions are not similar. Further, no correlation was found between time spent watching TV and category estimates or between time spent watching TV and strength of sex stereotyping of occupations. These results do not support the claim that TV is responsible for distorted social perceptions. In fact, respondents' distortions were consistently in the direction of overestimating sexual quality in occupations; that is, they were consistently antistereotypic.
McCauley et al. (Thu,) studied this question.