In Search of Entertainment-Education’s Effects on Attitudes and Behaviors

Abstract

The story of entertainment-education's effects on social behaviors is itself a literary genre of sorts, with memorable legends and alluring theoretical formulations about why dramatized messages work. One of my first encounters with this genre was in 2006, when reading a New Yorker magazine article that retold some of the most famous instances of entertainmenteducation's enormous reach and influence. For example, on the subject of adult literacy: For this telenovela, called "Ven Conmigo" ("Come with Me"), instead of the usual blond, blue-eyed leading ladies, Sabido chose actresses who were dark-haired and spoke with working-class accents. Its main plot centers on Barbara, a teacher from a working-class family, and Jorge, the wealthy man who loves her. Sabido's subplot involved some of Barbara's adult students, including a carpenter, a maid, a single mother who works on a farm, and an ex-con. Posters from the Ministry of Public Education's actual literacy campaign hung in the classroom. In the first episode, an older man sits outside Barbara's classroom without introducing himself. When she finally notices

Pathways of Global Cultural Diffusion: Mass Media and People’s Moral Declarations about Men’s Violence against Women

“…They also argue that liberal scripts are prominent in mass media, particularly in targeted mass media programs designed to diffuse such ideas. This theorizing is consistent with several experimental studies that observe positive treatments effects of anti-violence media programs on recipients' stated rejection of the notion that men are justified in abusing women, including evidence from specific areas of Mexico (Arias 2019), Nigeria (Banerjee et al 2019), and Uganda (Abramsky et al 2014), but such outcomes are not universal across programs (Green 2021).…”