Television viewing and mean world value in Hong Kong's adolescents

Past theory and research have held television responsible for cultivating the viewer's materialism and trivialization of crime, that is, mean world value. The cultivation effect occurs when the viewer watches television intensely and trustfully. It leads to hypotheses that one who watches television longer on a day and watches television serials repeatedly, and/or believes in the reality of television portrayals endorses mean world value to a greater extent. These effects reflect mechanisms of heuristic and peripheral processing. With data collected from 402 high school students in Hong Kong, this study supports the mediating hypotheses concerning perceived reality and its interaction with repeated exposure. These variables and the amount of television viewing on a weekday, exerted relatively strong cultivation effects on the adolescent viewer's mean world value, in terms of materialism and trivialization of moral value. The cultivation effect is attributable to the profusion of violence and consumerism on commercial television in Hong Kong. © Society for Personality Research (Inc.).