Paranormal Reality TV: Harmless Entertainment or Cultivation at Work? Part I

In Part I, I discuss the ubiquity of both paranormal reality shows and America's enduring beliefs and interest in paranormal phenomenon, as well as the power of the story to cultivate attitudes and opinions that more closely resemble the distorted narrative world provided through the window of television. What role does paranormal reality TV play in harming viewer's understanding of science? And how does paranormal programming reinforce belief in Woo?

Whether it's hunting ghosts, having adventures with ghosts, chasing UFOs, or just Big Foot, chances are there is a reality show about it, featuring a crack team of investigators and night-vision cameras.
 

Do You Believe? Infographic source R. Toro/LiveScience.com

Ever since the early success of shows like Ghost Hunters, the genre has seemingly exploded over the past decade, as some of TV's biggest networks have hopped onto the paranormal reality show bandwagon, including SyFy, National Geographic Channel, The Travel Channel, The History Channel, The Learning Channel, The Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, A&E, Biography, and TruTV.

While belief in certain phenomenon, such as devil possession, have waned since the early 1990s, Gallup polling, in particular, has shown that widespread beliefs in paranormal phenomenon have remained incredibly consistent. The growing ranks of atheists, agnostics and the otherwise non-religious, have seemingly not put much of a dent in the overall trend of America being a rather superstitious country, with a healthy majority of the population believing they have experienced a paranormal event, and a comfortable plurality believing in phenomenon such as ghosts and ESP.

However, the business of TV, is well, just that -a highly lucrative business, one that provides entertainment and escapism to mass audiences through the power of visual storytelling. And of course, paranormal programming of all stripes has never been more in vogue. But is paranormal reality TV harmless entertainment or is there a process of cultivation at work?

The power of storytelling

Chasing UFO's, Psychic Detectives, The Haunted Collector, and the mother of them all, Ghost Hunters, all have a strand of continuity, says Paul Brewer, Professor of communication at the University of Delaware and author of the study The Trappings of Science: Media Messages, Scientifc Authority, and Beliefs About Paranormal Investigators, and it isn’t just the shaky-cam, night vision scenes, over-the-top theme music and cheesy special effects: It's sounding and looking sciencey.

According to Brewer's research, published in the journal Science Communication last year, the audiences of paranormal programming aren't just paying attention to a story about ghost hunting, or investigating a supposedly paranormal event. They are paying attention to the scientific story being told, too. 

In an experiment set up to determine the influence of media messages on audiences perceptions of paranormal investigator's credibility, Brewer found that respondents  were more likely to lend credibility to investigators whose methods and tools were given the "trappings of science," or enough technical and scientific jargon to appear authoritative.

Yet whether a skeptic or a believer, we as a human species are all vulnerable to the seductive abilities of good storytelling, which has long been understood to be a powerful way to influence thoughts, opinions, beliefs and behaviors, (especially in the marketing and PR world). And as Brewer and others are demonstrating, audiences who are heavily invested in a story or narrative can also experience an unconscious reduction in their critical faculties.   

Research by psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock supports the notion that being exposed to certain narrative frameworks, as well as one’s level of interest in the story, are factors that contribute to how much a story alters an individual’s perception of reality. Their studies have shown that being highly absorbed in a story, or a process they call “transportation into narrative world,” leaves audiences less able to detect the “false notes” or inaccuracies or missteps, compared to those who are less transported by the narrative.

Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal, explains the effect in Why Storytelling is the Ultimate Weapon: 

“Importantly, it is not just that highly absorbed readers detected the false notes and didn't care about them (as when we watch a pleasurably idiotic film). They were unable to detect the false notes in the first place. 

And, in this, there is an important lesson about the molding power of story. When we read dry, factual arguments, we read with our dukes up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally and this seems to leave us defenseless.”

And while there is more follow up work to do on understanding how narratives can change beliefs, Green and Brock, along with their colleague, Jennifer Garst, have so far found that both fictional stories and factual stories can have similar powers to influence an individual’s real-world opinions.

 

Paranormal reality TV and Cultivation Theory

Suspending disbelief is part of the joys of experiencing the emotional ride an engaging and well-crafted narrative can induce. Although many of the causal mechanisms are not fully understood, a growing body of evidence supports the notion that the more audiences are exposed to narratives and stories, the more likely they are to be changed by them.  

A scene from the X-Files

In the 1970s, communications researcher Dr. George Gerbner, was able to demonstrate that repeat viewings of certain genres and narrative frameworks can, over time, gradually lead to significant changes in behavior and opinions. He referred to this process as "cultivation." Cultivation Theory emerged as a way to describe the effects of long-term exposure to TV programs on altering the perceptions of heavy viewers to more accurately reflect the distorted narrative world of television. 

Gerbner first observed this effect at work upon audiences whose diet of entertainment included regularly watching shows with high crime and violent themes. The term "mean world syndrome" was later coined to describe the mindset of heavy viewers, who were far more likely to overestimate real-world levels of crime when compared to light viewers.

There are many instances in everyday life where one encounters forms of the "mean world syndrome" in operation. Take for example, when a white female child goes missing at the hands of a stranger. In reality, these types of kidnappings are relatively rare. However, the news media's inordinate attention to these and similar events convinces many that the crime in question is far more common than it actually is. 

The media's particular tendency to focus upon gender and racial stereotypes in missing persons cases has even led to the emergence of the term "Missing White Woman Syndrome," to describe the wall-to-wall coverage that can ensue in such cases.

Of course, the media is full of shocking crimes, violence, freak injuries and warfare, and fears both rational and irrational abound in those who are affected by such themes in television and the news (as the old saying goes, "if it bleeds, it leads"). 

However, the investigative methods of cultivation theory have also been applied to many other genres and narrative frameworks, including soap-operas, reality TV and even the effects of paranormal-themed programming, providing strong validation of two major assumptions of the theory relevant to the question at hand: that repeat viewings makes audiences more likely to accept something as true, irrespective of the actual reliability and truth of the information presented, and that the process of cultivation is enhanced by audience's "perceived realism" of the situations presented on television.

The reality TV genre certainly aims to deliver an impression of authenticity, setting up expectations for audiences that the people and unfolding events in the show are real, even when the contexts in which characters are depicted are unrealistic. 

Kristin Barton, author of The Mean World Effects of Reality Television: Perceptions of Antisocial Behaviors Resulting From Exposure to Competition-Based Reality Programming, explains that the "reality" moniker primes audiences with expectations.

“Certainly reality television provides a distorted view, especially in the cases of competition-based reality programs where contestants are forced to compete and eliminate each other,” says Barton. “Even though these situations never arise in real-world situations, viewers hold very few reservations about applying the term “reality TV” to these programs. The term “reality TV” is itself a signal to viewers about what they can expect to see on these shows.”

The cable networks that carry paranormal reality TV shows are well aware of this framing. SyFy, for example, packages its flagship Ghost Hunters show as a one-hour "docu-soap," while TruTV refers to its outlandish reality programming, like Jesse Ventura's Conspiracy Theories, and Haunting Evidence,  as "Not Reality. Actuality." 

Yet as Cultivation Theory researchers are learning, the cultivation effect isn’t equal for everyone. Those with no pre-existing beliefs and experiences, or those who approach the supernatural through a skeptical lens, are less likely to be pulled in by the scientific story paranormal reality shows are selling.

According to Glenn Sparks and Will Miller in Investigating the Relationship Between Exposure to Television Programs that Depict Paranormal Phenomena and Beliefs in the Paranormal, the respondents in their study who had self-reported no prior experience with the paranormal were unlikely to have their beliefs about the paranormal influenced by viewing programs with paranormal content. “But for those who did report such an experience,” say Sparks and Miller, “viewing paranormal programs contributed an additional 11% of significant variance to the prediction of paranormal beliefs ...”  

Framing paranormal pseudoscience as part of the reality genre undoubtedly sets receptive audiences up for the uncritical acceptance of supernatural claims, and the media’s heavy promotion of such nonsense isn't helping.

To be continued next week...

In Part II, I'll get more into the role the corporate media plays in propagating reality TV pseudoscience and provide a short guide to spotting the difference between sound science and a sciencey story.