Limited Effects Theory

Overview

In the field of mass communication studies, the limited effects theory argues that despite popular notions (even fears) of how direct and very focused messages from a central entity (such as a government) can cow entire segments of a general population into believing whatever the message is, that effect may be overrated. As iconic sociologist Herbert Krugman noted in 1965, "Among the wonders of the twentieth century has been the ability of the mass media repeatedly to expose audiences numbered in millions to campaigns of coordinated messages….it was assumed that exposure equaled persuasion and that media content therefore was the all-important object of study or censure." Research into how people think and how they make decisions, however, reveals that such mass communication bombardment in fact has little direct impact on such basic activities, that, in fact, people, despite being part of a large demographic or a member of a large general population, maintain an individual integrity and reserve the right to evaluate the worth and value of a message based on a variety of individual variables and in turn to decide based on those variables whether to accept or reject the message. Nevertheless, concerns remain. Herbert J. Gan, a pioneer in mass communication theory, argued as early as 1995, "[P]eople want to know whether the media on which they depend for information and entertainment have good or bad effects—on them, their children….and on America in general." Simply because mass communication systems exist (such as magazines, radio, television, and most recently the Internet), people do not relinquish their right to think simply by being part of a group. According to the argument of the limited effects theory, a population is less a collective with a single fused sensibility and more a complex collection of diverse thinking individuals with radically individual experiences, and it is exactly those experiences that are brought to bear in the process of receiving and digesting and in turn acting on the messages delivered by mass communications.

As traced by Valdivia and Simonson (2012), limited effects theory emerged in the 1940s largely as a research project charged to investigate the impact of the public relations in the electronics era and specifically the new science of political candidate handling as it impacted general elections. The assumption made by a generation of communication theorists had been that mass communication "injects" a population with a message much like delivering the serum in a hypodermic needle (giving rise to the name hypodermic needle theory). Limited effects theory has come to be applied to more than voting patterns. It has been applied to questions about the impact of mass advertising, specifically television advertising, on consumers in a free-market society where businesses use the visual impact of mass market commercials to convince potential customers to purchase their goods or services. What impact does a flashy, slick commercial have on the actual decision a person makes about which jeans to buy or which car to buy? According to limited effects theorists, very little (Thibault, 2016). A person's decisions about who to vote for or which car to buy are driven more by practical and very individual concerns than any simplistic susceptibility to advertising.

The pioneering data research into the impact of mass communication on individuals was initially conducted by Austrian Paul Felix Lazarsfeld (1901–1976) shortly after World War II. Trained as a mathematician, Lazarsfeld came of age during the emergence of the Nazi Party in neighboring Germany, a political ascendancy driven in part by a massive, indeed historically unprecedented propaganda machine directly under the control of the Nazi Party elites, a mass communication system that relentlessly promoted the toxic political, social, economic, and cultural views of the Nazi Party, which included a vision of inevitable world conquest, the unquestioned purity of the German race itself, and the dire threat posed by the Jewish people to German racial purity.

Himself a Jew, Lazarsfeld, before fleeing his homeland, observed firsthand how mass communication, the Nazis' massive and efficient propaganda machine, used radio, newspapers, film, handbills, massive rallies, the display of party symbols on virtually every street corner, the appropriation of music, and the distribution of elaborately staged photo images, to create about the person of Adolf Hitler an aura of transcendent power and near cosmic significance. In addition to that mass communication network, the Nazi Party, as part of its ascendancy into power, shut down alternative views by an insidious network of censorship and intimidation. For close to eight years, the relentless Nazi message was delivered virtually unchallenged. Given the aggressive and belligerent tone of the Nazi message, the rest of the world was both puzzled and alarmed.

According to the hypodermic needle theory, the otherwise good and decent German people had simply been brainwashed by the Nazi propaganda machine. Lazarsfeld, as a theoretical mathematician, was not so sure. Beginning his work initially at Princeton University but moving to Columbia University in Manhattan where he founded the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Lazarsfeld spearheaded the use of actual data rather than anecdotal evidence in the field of mass communication studies. "[He] argued that new research methods such as experiments and surveys would make it possible to directly observe and draw objective conclusions about the effects of media. These conclusions would guide the construction of more useful theory that was grounded in systematic observation, not wild speculation" (Naveed, 2017).

Such empirical research had seldom been applied to paradigms of communication systems. Using the 1940 national elections between Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Wendell Willkie, Lazarsfeld focused on a single predominantly Republican county in northwestern Pennsylvania. For two months leading up to the national elections, Lazarsfeld and his team tirelessly canvassed the voters of Erie County; in addition to compiling data in gender, age, income, and education, the team carefully compiled quantitative data on what media the residents used to learn about their candidates, how much time they spent listening to the radio or reading a newspaper; how much time they spent talking with family and friends and local political operatives about the election. Shortly before the election, in an election that was pitching wildly toward Roosevelt, Lazarsfeld accurately predicted Erie County would go Republican, which it did. Lazarsfeld argued the mass media blitz in favor of the Democratic incumbent was a marginal factor in any one individual voter's decision. The bottom line: Certain individuals might be convinced by mass communication, but not the larger mass of people.

It was an exciting and controversial argument. In the wake of World War II and Hitler's seemingly irresistible propaganda machine, America was concerned over the rise of totalitarian Communist governments that also generated propaganda. Lazarsfeld's theoretical work disproved the notion of mass "brainwashing." Over the next three decades, research into limited effects theory came to dismiss such dystopian fears as exaggerated and simplistic. It was not so easy for a government to manipulate its people by bombarding it with messages. People are not so easily compelled. Certainly, mass communication machines can influence a select few—but even then, data revealed the media and its message did not actually convince the people. Rather these people were already vulnerable to the message because of individual circumstances—their upbringing, their psychological profile, their level of education, their family life, their profession, their circle of close friends.

Applications

Lazarsfeld's theoretical model gained widespread attention when, during the 1950s and early 1960s, television emerged as a new force in mass communication. Television offered an accessibility and an immediacy that earlier media simply did not have. The question then was whether television would alter the premise of limited effects theory. If Lazarsfeld's initial research was applied almost exclusively to the political uses of mass communication and the effects of such organized campaigns, the theory seemed applicable as well to the global reach of television as both a platform for news (and the promulgating of false news, disinformation, and propaganda) and as a vehicle for advertising. A magazine ad promoting the sale of a breakfast cereal was two-dimensional and easily ignored in the corner of a page of a mass circulation newspaper or a single page in a magazine such as Time or Saturday Evening Post. A commercial advertisement designed and programmed for television represented an entirely new dimension in mass communication. Television audiences, especially before the introduction of remote controls, were largely compelled to sit through regularly scheduled commercial breaks, and commercials emerged as a revolutionary tool for mass communication. A commercial for that same breakfast cereal now featured characters, offered a story; major businesses hired celebrities to act as spokespersons; commercials used dialogue or voice narration or even celebrity spokespersons; commercials used jingles and catchy slogans; commercials created elaborate visual impacts with lettering. More to the point, any one commercial or any single brand from a soda company to a car company could put commercials into a regular rotation, seeking validation and adoption by the viewer through repetition. In addition, the broadcast commercial packaged tidy and neat promises that were largely unsubstantiated by any empirical data—this shampoo would make hair bouncy; this sugary cereal would give a child plenty of energy; this cigarette was smooth.

In the face of this powerful new technology and its relentless messaging, communications scholars wondered in Lazarsfeld's theoretical model was now outdated. Marketers and their clients appeared to hope that consumers, sitting in front of their television screens, would set aside their own evaluation systems, their own convictions, their own experience and be manipulated by the new medium. The data gathered suggested just the opposite. If a consumer needed a car, for example, the advertising on television might guide them to a particular dealership—that is, the advertising was more informational than persuasive. Once the consumer was on site and was examining the cars for sale, decisions about a purchase would be made not because this model or that model was advertised—in fact, research indicated that a recommendation by a family member or a consumer's own previous experience in purchasing cars would have far more impact. Much like voting decisions and political messaging, commercial advertising was mitigated by a variety of factors that had more to do with the integrity and expertise of the individual than it did with the clever slogans, catchy tunes, and celebrity spokespersons. Ultimately, according to limited effects theory, a television commercial might convince a viewer to have pizza for dinner—but not necessarily the pizza being advertised.

With the advent of the Internet and digital communication, however, limited effects theorists are once again investigating an entirely new dimension to a communications system's impact. With the exponential proliferation of websites dedicated to both public issues and political messaging as well as sites sponsored by businesses interested in promoting services and goods now to a global market, will this new inundation of communication messages delivered to the convenience of a home computer or a phone alter the limited effects theory?

Issues

As early as 2003, Michael Gallagher argued that with the rise of the Internet, political campaigns themselves will become irrelevant. Social media platforms and websites, he predicted, will bring candidates and their messages directly to the public. Further, for limited effects theorists, the digital revolution represented a potential for so much information and disinformation blurring distinctions between fact and fiction—manufactured or authentic—and leaving the consumer unable, unwilling, and even uninterested in sorting and parsing the raw message. The traditional reliance on the integrity and common sense of the consumer, which dates back to Lazarsfeld's original premise, comes to be more suspect in an era of global communication networks.

For limited effects theorists, the reach of the Internet and digital mass communication has yet to evidence any data to suggest that personal computers and smartphones have somehow diminished the integrity of the individual, that they have somehow reduced consumers to glassy-eyed zombies doing the bidding of the political campaigners and marketing people. This despite 2021 polling data from the Pew Research Center that finds many Americans believe media influence over the public is growing.

In short, digital communication has given no reason to qualify the premise upon which limited effects theorists rest their entire argument: Ultimately, mass communication is a tool, not a brainwashing technique. An effective message delivered in an effective and engaging manner will attract a consumer or voter, but an individual relies more on personal variables—their own common sense, their experience, the advice of friends, their value system, their religious upbringing, their social and economic status, their education. Mass communication is at best one of a number of critical pressures that impact people's lives.

Bibliography

Gallagher, M. (2003). Do political campaigns matter? Campaign effects in elections and referendums. Journal of Representative Democracy, 40(1), 67–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/00344890308523247

Gottfried, J., and Forman-Katz, N. (2021, May 17) More Americans Now See the Media’s Influence Growing Compared With a Year Ago. Pew Research Center. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/05/17/more-americans-now-see-the-medias-influence-growing-compared-with-a-year-ago/

Malherek, J. (2022). Lazarsfeld's legacy—a socialism of empiricism, not ideology: Paul Lazarsfeld and commitment in social research. International Journal of Communication, 16, https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/18732

Thibault, G. (2016). Needles and bullets: Media theory, medicine, and propaganda, 1910–1940. In K. Nixon & L. Servitje (Eds.), Endemic. doi: 10.1057/978–1-137–52141–5‗4

Valdivia, A. N., & Simonson, P. (2012). The rise and fall of the limited effects model. In A. N. Valdivia (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies. doi:10.1002/9781444361506.wbiems030

Valkenburg, P. M., Peter, J., & Walther, J. B. (2016). Media effects: Theory and research. Annual Review of Psychology, 67(1), 315–338. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033608

Young, R. O. (2017). Persuasive communication: How audiences decide. London: Routledge.