Television and Trust: An Analytical Approach to Media Effects

Jaclyn Boone May 2, 2012

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Introduction
Television news is often considered a sensationalist medium, epitomizing the journalistic motto, If it bleeds, it leads. Entertainment TV can be just as extreme, depicting complicated schemes and dramatic betrayals as well as violence. Many social scientists and media critics have analyzed how television violence affects viewers behavior (especially in children), but what effect does it have on their attitudes? How does the exaggerated drama presented in the media affect peoples trust? More importantly, for those who believe that the effect is significant, are there any factors that counter or moderate the relationship, any protective demographic or psychographic characteristics? In this report, I predict that extensive television viewing will increase distrust. However, this relationship will be somewhat moderated by the introduction of respondents level of education as a control variable: well-educated individuals will be better able to separate media encounters from real-life situations. I also expect that those with the highest levels of education will both watch less television and be more trusting: their intellectual curiosity will make TV less interesting to them, and their knowledge about the world will give them the confidence to know when others can be trusted.

Data and Methods

This data comes from responses to the General Social Survey (GSS), an annual questionnaire presented to a sample of United States adults. The dataset contains responses from 1972 to 2006, but these answers were from the most recent year. I kept the original parameters of the sample intact because, as demonstrated by the relatively low numbers of respondents who reported watching no TV at all, most Americans have at least some exposure to television. Even people who do not own a TV may encounter it on a somewhat regular basis in restaurants, in department stores, and at other peoples homes. TV viewing was initially coded as a quantitative variable, so each respondents exact numeric answer was recorded. I recoded the variable into ordinal categories, creating groups of respondents who had reported watching 0, 1 to 2, 3 to 4, and 5 or more hours of television each day. Respondents levels of trust were measured by their answers to the question: Can people be trusted? The resulting categories, Can trust, Cannot trust, and Depends, did not need to be recoded. Finally, the original variable that measured level of education asked respondents about the highest degree they had obtained, and it contained too many categories to be easily understandable when crosstabulated with other factors. I simplified it to only distinguish between respondents who had not completed high school, respondents with a high school degree, respondents with an associates or bachelors degree, and respondents with some sort of graduate degree.

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Results
Table 1 shows a negative relationship between television viewing and trust. Of people who watched no TV at all, 43.2 percent responded that people can be trusted, compared to 25.4 percent of people who watched 5 hours or more of TV each day, a difference of 17.8 percentage points. Respondents from the latter group were also 20.1 percentage points more likely to say that people cannot be trusted than those who did not watch TV. For both trust categories, respondents in the middle two TV categories (1-2 hours and 3-4 hours) fell in between the two extremes, showing a loss of trust as time spent watching TV increased.

Table 1: Trust by Hours of TV Watched per Day (in percent)

0 hours 1-2 hours 3-4 hours 5+ hours Can trust Cannot trust Depends Total (N) 43.2 50.3 6.4 100 (807) 40.5 54.5 5.0 100 (7890) 33.9 61.9 4.2 100 (5356) 25.4 70.4 4.2 100 (2807)

Source: General Social Survey 2006

Table 2 shows the effect of introducing respondents highest degrees as a control variable. Level of education has an interactive relationship with the other two variables: the difference in trust between extremes of TV viewers varies from one category of the control variable to the next. The relationship between hours of TV watched and trust is weakest for respondents with less than a high school degree and becomes stronger as level of education increases, peaking among respondents with graduate degrees. Among respondents without a high school degree, those who do not watch TV are only 3.8 percentage points more likely to say that people can be trusted than non-HS graduates who watch 5 hours or more of TV each day, and they are 3.2 percentage points less likely to say that people cannot be trusted. The percentage point difference in Can trust responses increases to 10.6 among respondents with a high school degree, 17.6 for those with associates or bachelors degrees, and 29.4 for those with graduate degrees. Cannot trust responses, which have the opposite relationship with television viewing, follow the same pattern of increasing differences: people in the Less than High School category are most likely - and people in the Graduate Degree category, least likely - to say that others cannot be trusted.

Table 2: Trust by Hours of TV Watched per Day and Highest Degree Obtained (in percent) Less than HS Degree 0 hours Can trust Cannot trust Depends Total (N) 23.4 73.0 3.6 100 (137) 1-2 hours 22.1 73.9 4.1 100 (1247) 3-4 hours 22.6 74.3 3.1 100 (1282) 5+ hours 19.6 76.2 4.2 100 (1027) 0 hours 37.6 57.6 4.8 100 (354) HS Degree 1-2 hours 37.4 58.4 4.2 100 (3929) 3-4 hours 34.3 61.5 4.2 100 (3011) 5+ hours 27.0 69.0 3.9 100 (1476) Associates or Bachelors 0 hours 55.5 35.5 9.1 100 (220) 1-2 hours 50.2 43.6 6.2 100 (1980) 3-4 hours 44.2 50.5 5.3 100 (855) 5+ hours 37.9 57.4 4.7 100 (256) 0 hours 66.0 24.5 9.6 100 (94) Graduate Degree 1-2 hours 63.1 29.4 7.5 100 (720) 3-4 hours 56.0 37.5 6.5 100 (200) 5+ hours 36.6 56.1 7.3 100 (41)

Source: General Social Survey 2006

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Figure 1: Percentage Point Difference in Can Trust Responses by Highest Degree Obtained

Source: General Social Survey 2006 Valid Cases: 16829 Missing Cases: 34191 Figure 1 provides an illustration of this changing relationship. The differences in percentage points from Table 2 are charted and compared to the original difference of 17.8 percentage points between heavy TV viewers and non-viewers for respondents at all education levels. This chart reveals a suppressor effect in the Graduate Degree category, which has a percentage point difference that is 11.6 greater than the one found in the original relationship between TV hours and trust.

Boone 4 Table 3: Trust by Highest Degree Obtained (in percent) Less than HS Can trust Cannot trust Depends Total (N) 25.0 71.2 3.8 100 (7722) HS Degree 37.5 58.6 3.9 100 (17258) Associates or Bachelors 50.6 43.6 5.8 100 (6273) Graduate Degree 61.4 30.8 7.8 100 (2063)

Source: General Social Survey 2006 Table 3 shows a significant positive relationship between the control and dependent variables, an individuals level of education and his or her level of trust. Of respondents with graduate degrees, 61.4 percent said that people can be trusted, 36.4 percentage points higher than the 25.0 percent of respondents with less than high school degrees who agreed to that statement. Those without high school degrees overwhelmingly concluded that people cannot be trusted; 71.2 percent were in the Cannot trust category compared to only 30.8 percent of respondents with graduate degrees, a difference of 40.4 percentage points. Table 4: Highest Degree Obtained by Hours of TV Watched per Day (in percent) 0 hours Less than HS HS Degree Associates or Bachelors Graduate Degree Total (N) 18.0 43.4 25.9 12.7 100 (1374) 1-2 hours 16.5 50.0 24.3 9.2 100 (13902) 3-4 hours 24.2 56.6 15.4 3.8 100 (9517) 5+ hours 37.9 51.9 8.6 1.7 100 (4947)

Source: General Social Survey 2006 Table 4 compares the control to the independent variable and finds a negative relationship between peoples levels of education and the amount of TV they watch. People with graduate degrees are 33.3 percentage points more likely than people with less than a high school education to watch 1 to 2 hours of TV each day: 67.4 percent of Graduate Degree respondents fall into this viewing category, compared to only 34.1 percent of Less than High School respondents. Conversely, individuals without high school degrees are 15.2 percentage points more likely than those with graduate degrees to watch 3 to 4 hours of TV every day, and they are 23.5 percentage points more likely to watch 5 hours or more.

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Conclusion
These results confirm the initial hypothesis that peoples trust increases with the amount of television they watch. Education had an effect on the relationship, but it did not universally reduce the correlation, as I had expected. Instead, the control variable created an interactive relationship, where the strength of the relationship increases throughout the educational level categories. The correlation is reduced from the original table for the lowest three categories of respondents (Less than High School, High School Degree, and Associates or Bachelors), but it increases for respondents with graduate degrees. This means that people with the highest levels of education experience the greatest reduction in trust when they watch more TV. These findings may be surprising, but they are not as earth-shattering as they seem. Since TV viewing is negatively correlated with level of education, as shown in Table 4, calculations for trust among the 5-hour watchers were based on an increasingly smaller percent of respondents as level of education increased. Only 4.4 percent of respondents with graduate degrees watched 5 hours or more of TV on a daily basis, compared to 27.9 percent of respondents without a high school degree, so calculations for trust among the Graduate Degree category were based on 4.4 percent of the sample. This does not discount the accuracy of the results, but it does suggest that their external validity is limited. While it is tempting to suggest limiting the size of each educational category to see the resulting balance of trust and TV viewing, this would result in an extremely unrepresentative sample of the U.S. population and would present its own limits to generalizability.