Comfortably Numb: Effects of Prolonged Media Coverage

Hoffman, Aaron M.; Kaire, José

doi:10.1177/0022002720907675

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 88 publications

(103 reference statements)

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“…The idea that people experience less-intense affective reactions to stimuli and events after an initial exposure—that is, desensitization (Campbell et al, 2014)—has received wide support. In the lab, people express less-extreme evaluations of the same affect-arousing stimulus after an initial encounter with it (Leventhal et al, 2007), and they display less-angry facial expressions in response to a first video clip depicting a terrorist attack than to a fifth clip depicting a different terrorist attack (Hoffman & Kaire, 2020). Outside the lab, people appear to become desensitized to violence after repeated exposure to it in the media (Carnagey et al, 2007; Funk et al, 2003), and clinicians leverage insights about desensitization to treat phobias and trauma (Rothbaum & Schwartz, 2002; Wolpe, 1961).…”

Section: The Present Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The moral repetition effect: Bad deeds seem less unethical when repeatedly encountered.

Effron¹

2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Reports of moral transgressions can "go viral" through gossip, continuous news coverage, and social media. When they do, the same person is likely to hear about the same transgression multiple times. The present research demonstrates that people will judge the same transgression less severely after repeatedly encountering an identical description of it. I present seven experiments (six of which were preregistered; 73,265 observations from 3,301 online participants and urban residents holding 55 nationalities). Participants rated fake-news sharing, real and hypothetical business transgressions, violations of fundamental "moral foundations," and various everyday wrongdoings as less unethical and less deserving of punishment if they had been shown descriptions of these behaviors previously. Results suggest that affect plays an important role in this moral repetition effect. Repeated exposure to a description of a transgression reduced the negative affect that the transgression elicited, and less-negative affect meant less-harsh moral judgments. Moreover, instructing participants to base their moral judgments on reason, rather than emotion, eliminated the moral repetition effect. An alternative explanation based on perceptions of social norms received only mixed support. The results extend understanding of when and how repetition influences judgment, and they reveal a new way in which moral judgments are biased by reliance on affect. The more people who hear about a transgression, the wider moral outrage will spread; but the more times an individual hears about it, the less outraged that person may be.

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Section: The Present Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The moral repetition effect: Bad deeds seem less unethical when repeatedly encountered.

Effron¹

2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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“…Research in conflict studies has found that exposure to an isolated media story about terrorism causes heightened anxiety (Breckenridge, Zimbardo, and Sweeton, 2010) and support for security measures at the expensive of civil freedoms (Merolla and Zechmeister, 2009). However, Hoffman and Kaire (2020) show that prolonged exposure to several terrorism reports attenuates these effects as people quickly become habituated to hearing about political violence. Relatedly, a lengthy literature speaks to the desensitizing effects of prolonged exposure to violent crime (Fowler et al, 2009).…”

Section: Problems and Attention In Policymakingmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Bad News Becomes Routine: Slowly-Developing Problems Moderate Government Responsiveness

Epp

Thomas

2022

Political Research Quarterly

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Established theories of the policy process recognize the challenges governments face in processing information. We examine how the ways in which public problems develop over time condition subsequent policy actions. We contend that policymakers will become routinized to and consequently under-respond to the accumulating signals of slowly-developing problems (i.e., those featuring long runs of relatively small changes). Event history analyses leverage variation across the United States in the development of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent implementation of social distancing policies. Looking across the 50 states and Washington DC, we find that regions that saw protracted deterioration in their health situation were slower to respond with social distancing than those that saw an abrupt deterioration to the same point. These results highlight the risks associated with problems that worsen only gradually over time.

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“…This is an ordinal within-subject variable with three levels: pre-treatment, posttreatment, and follow-up (11 months after the completion of the pilot study). Including this variable aims to assess the stability of the effect of the designed program once the initial momentum of the treated topics fades from participants' recent memory, thus avoiding confusion between the effects caused by the intervention and those caused by experimental maturation, as reported in numerous similar previous studies [73,74].…”

Section: Within-subject Intervening Variable: Evolution Over Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Design and Evaluation of a Collective Preventive Program for Musical Performance Anxiety (ConfiDance)

Gómez-López,

Sánchez-Cabrero

2024

EJIHPE

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Musical performance anxiety (MPA) is considered a subtype of social phobia and affects musicians who must face musical exposure in public, potentially severely affecting their emotional stability and significantly impairing the quality of their performance. This research has utilized previous scientific knowledge on the issue and a qualitative approach to musicians’ needs through focus groups in order to design a collective preventive program for MPA that could be implemented within the training curriculum of professional musicians. To evaluate the adequacy of the preventive program ‘ConfiDance’, a pilot test was conducted with a sample of 17 professional musicians in training, all post-graduate students in classical music performance. For the pilot test, a quasi-experimental model with a repeated measures methodology (pre-post and one-year follow-up after application) was carried out. The results indicate a significant decrease in MPA after the program implementation, with a notable improvement in effect one year post-application, demonstrating an even greater positive impact over time. These data should be interpreted cautiously due to sample limitations but represent an opportunity for the future implementation of a program that can prevent and treat MPA in music education centers.

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Comfortably Numb: Effects of Prolonged Media Coverage

Cited by 7 publications

References 88 publications

The moral repetition effect: Bad deeds seem less unethical when repeatedly encountered.

The moral repetition effect: Bad deeds seem less unethical when repeatedly encountered.

When Bad News Becomes Routine: Slowly-Developing Problems Moderate Government Responsiveness

Design and Evaluation of a Collective Preventive Program for Musical Performance Anxiety (ConfiDance)

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