The 3-Perspectives Model for Understanding Documentaries:
An analysis of how entertainment, persuasion and objectivity influence the impact of documentaries on political attitudes.
Master’s Thesis
Daniel K Schulz (10627162)
University of Amsterdam | Graduate School of Communication Political Communication & Journalism
Supervisor: Anouk van Drunen June 27th, 2014
Dedication
First of all, I would like to thank all the people that are dear to me, thus without them I would have never made it this far. Specifically I would like to thank my supervisor Anouk for guiding me during this stressful last period of my studies: Thank you for all the freedom and last minute help! Special thanks go to the organizers and admins of TOP DOCUMENTARY FILMS and DOCUMENTRY ADDICT. You have made this sample size and research possible. Your work is truly great! To anyone who would like to watch documentaries online, check their websites out. Seeing this as my last piece of scientific contribution I would also like to thank the people who have made this journey possible for me in the past years: My family. Thank you Mom! Thank you Dad! Thank you Grandma! I cannot express enough how thankful I am to be
privileged to have you as my parents and mentors. Lastly I would like to thank Camilla and my housemates for all the love and patience that you had to endure when insomnia, writers-block or statistic-sickness got the better end of me.
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Research on the effects of the film-genre documentaries has been largely neglected in the academic community. Arguing that documentaries make up a new breed of blurred media, mixing auteurist campaigning with styles of news-reporting together with the more than ever mainstream consumption as mere entertainment, this study builds and assesses a conceptual model of understanding this unexplored realm. Testing the 3-Perspectives Model with an online experiment (N=301) clearly indicated that the short political documentary “The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and Alfonso Cuaron” induced omnidirectional attitude changes. Tests for statistical validity hinted towards a moderating role of respondents’ entertainment-perception on the strength of attitudinal. The implications of this study suggest that the most effective strategy to persuade a documentary’s audience is to divert the audience’s cognitive resistance efforts onto different topics whilst not overtly giving rational arguments for the actual line of persuasion.
Keywords:
Contents
Abstract ... 3
Introduction ... Error! Bookmark not defined. Theory ... 7
Previous Findings on Documentaries ... 7
Resistance and Reactance to Persuasion ... 10
3-Perspectives Model of Persuasion and Resistance within Documentaries ... 12
Methods ... 16
Sample ... 16
Research Design ... 18
Results ... 26
Testing Adequacy of Methods ... 27
Testing Model Hypotheses ... 32
Discussion... 36
References ... 43
Appendix 1 - Content Analysis ... 48
Appendix 2 – Primers ... 54
Appendix 3 – Primers Pretest ... 57
Appendix 4 - Survey Questionnaire ... 58
We live in a time in which we constantly carry devices in our pockets or even on our faces that enable us to consume media every second of the day. New media as well as old media are an omnipresent factor in our lives. Consequently it has become the norm to use a fully integrated 360 degrees communication approach, leveraging on all forms of visual storytelling, when trying to persuade the public of any product or cause. In the realm of political communication, scholars and communications specialists have termed this development The Postmodern Period of
Political Communication (Strömbäck, 2007) or even proclaimed the Third Age of
Communication (Blumler & Kavanagh, 1999). Highly professionalized media campaigns and mass media advocacy efforts have become the standard of any political or social group.
Adding the relatively new affordability to produce and distribute persuasive films with the means of a couple of clicks, formerly niche social movements and civil disobedience organizations have hopped on the bandwagon and are producing persuasive content en masse. It is not a new revelation that the most prevailing choice for these kinds of advocacy efforts has been documentary films. However, when adding the abundance of highly professionalized communication specialists to the mix, the production value and persuasive qualities of
documentaries have reached new heights. On top of that, from an audience perspective, the genre of documentaries has fully arrived in the mainstream. Documentaries have not only gained popular acknowledgment through film-prizes but now also make large profits in the cinemas (Higgins, 2005). It is surprising that this rise in popularity with both filmmakers and audiences has not translated into scholarly interest. Most existing research on persuasive media effects can be divided into overt advertising (Bandura, 2001; McCarthy, 2004; Kniazeva, 2004; Laran, Dalton and Andrade, 2011), news media (Schuck, Boomgaarden & Vreese, 2013; Ladd & Lenz, 2009; DellaVigna & Kapplan, 2008; Higgins, 2005), and fictional entertainment media (Moyer-
Gusé, 2008; Bhatnagar, Aksoy & Malkoc, 2004; Green, Garst & Brock, 2004; Higgins, 2005). Whilst one can explain this academic negligence for documentaries with a marginalized popularity within the mainstream in the past, in times of their risen popularity and professional usage, it seems more than overdue to pay more attention to the medium . Therefore the first aim of this study is to clarify in how far the effects of political documentaries compare to the effects of the above mentioned categories. By showing a political documentary and testing to what extent it affects its audience’s political attitudes one can formulate the main research question as follows:
RQ1: To what extent do the persuasive messages of the political documentary “The
Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and Alfonso Cuaron” affect audiences’ political attitudes?
The need for in depth research documentaries becomes clear at the very least when failing to find a commonly agreed definition for the term itself. Whilst the term documentary often implicates a very specific type of medium within the mindset of an individual, a common definition for what a documentary actually is, is far more difficult to come by. Higgins (2005), who discusses a current shift of popular understanding of the term documentary, roots the concept back to the emergence of Social Issues and Public Affairs Broadcasts (SIPA) (Fitzsimmons & Osburn, 1968) or simply put: Informational documentaries. Higgins (2005) argues that the original popular understanding and connotations for this medium used to be clearly connected to truthful mass education and moreover a justifiable persuasion by an objective and powerful elite institution. She however concludes that this popular understanding of documentaries has been rather washed out and shifted to an acknowledgement of an “openly auteurist” and even “defiantly partisan” (p.22) nature for this medium; as a medium which can
moreover be consumed in more ways than for purposes of education or persuasion, namely entertainment. This perceived change in understanding is most fittingly coined by Green, Garst and Brock (2004), who describe documentaries as “blurred media” (p.165), for which its audience cannot entirely distinguish fiction and non-fiction.
Therefore the second part of this study is building on Higgins’ (2005) and Green, Garst and Brock’s (2004) work. It is important to investigate how the various general expectations and specific perceptions of documentaries, that seem to make the genre so special, can influence any effects found in the first part of this research. Therefore this study will extract theoretical ideas connected to the implications of differentiated interpretations about documentaries and build a model focused on the following research question:
RQ2: To what extent do audience perceptions of entertainment and objectivity moderate
a documentary’s effect on political attitudes?
Theory Previous Findings on Documentaries
As already discussed before, the research on effects of the genre documentaries has been largely neglected. In the recent history Natalie Stroud (2007) has produced the only work on documentaries that has been cited to a significant amount. Her study on media effects and selective exposure stands for the entire range of research recently conducted on documentaries: Although she found that the film did indeed result in attitude effects and a higher frequency of political discussion, her main argument was that of strengthened polarization, rather than a directional change in attitudes. This argument was mostly backed by her finding that people selectively exposed themselves to the documentary, meaning that people favoring the before
known message of the film were more likely to seek exposure to it than people with opposing viewpoints. Whilst these findings give a quite useful understanding of how documentaries can affect their audiences given the circumstances of actively selecting a movie in the cinema, notably quite a financial and timely effort, the spectrum of modern documentaries in an increasingly online environment are far not extensively explored in an academic way. Additionally the previous research has mostly regarded the genre of documentaries with the premise of it being a biased piece of information, rather than delving deeper into the blurred forms of information, entertainment and persuasion, as discussed by Green, Garst and Brock (2004). Nonetheless her findings suggest that one can expect to find a general impact on attitudes when showing a documentary to an audience:
H1: The documentary is expected to change political attitudes of its audience.
As Stroud (2007) found that a documentary changed viewers’ attitudes in the certain direction that was expected from the general argumentation and focus of the documentary, one can derive a set of hypotheses about the direction of attitude change discussed in H1. Following her findings one can expect that attitudes will change negatively when a topic is either argued against in a rational way, depicted as something unenjoyable, or brought into connection with a commonly undesirable topic or behavior. In the same manner one can expect a positive attitude change for a topic when it is rationally argued for, depicted as visually enjoyable, or brought into direct connection with a commonly desirable topic or behavior. Taking these expectations and applying them to the findings of the qualitative content analysis (which is largely discussed in the M-Section) one can expect the following attitudinal changes induced by the documentary of this study:
H1a: Respondents are expected to feel emotional about the imagery and change their
attitudes positively towards the rights of mentally ill patients.
H1b: The documentary is expected to influence its viewers negatively towards the idea of
a free market economy.
H1c: The documentary is expected to negatively influence its viewers’ evaluation of
democracy.
H1d: The documentary is expected to negatively influence its viewers’ belief that they
can influence politics.
H1e: The documentary is expected to positively influence its viewers’ belief that forms of
civil disobedience, such as illegal demonstrations, are a good way to influence politics. Instead of directly building on Stroud’s (2007) research on selective exposure, findings that are sufficiently proven and reproduced at large (Levendusky, 2013; Knobloch-Westerwinck, 2012), this study will mainly focus on the specific attitudinal effects, which have not been paid attention to in the picture of blurred forms of media within documentaries. As discussed at large in a later point, different aspects in a documentaries narrative and argumentation can lead to very different interpretations and evaluations. Hence different attitudes concerning the documentary as well as the underlying political ideologies might be affected individually. As the main goal is to gain a better understanding on how these different, and often very individual, interpretations of messages have an effect on specific political attitudes, a subset of hypotheses (H1a – H1e) will be discussed in the Method & Results section.
Keeping in mind that Stroud’s (2007) findings showed polarization as the key effect in attitudinal change, rather than omnipresent directional change, it is important to control for
viewers previous attitudes and preferences. Deriving from her findings the following hypothesis can be formulated:
H2: The respondents’ attitudes are expected to polarize, instead of changing into a single
direction.
Resistance and Reactance to Persuasion
The need to analyze all three forms of interpretations of documentaries becomes clear when considering all implications we can gather from theories about the resistance towards persuasive messages. The base of understanding derives from Friestad and Wright’s (1994) Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM), which indicates that people’s knowledge about persuasion techniques influences their responses to persuasion attempts. In detail this means that any
interpretation and evaluation of a persuasion attempt depend on the receiver’s agent knowledge, or the previous perceptions about the message sender, the persuasion knowledge, or the
receiver’s identification of persuasion techniques, and lastly the topic knowledge, in other words the previous involvement and information the receiver held about the topic of the message. According to their model the most common effects of interpreting a message as a persuasion attempt are disengagement and detachment from the ongoing interaction or message. A very compelling example of this negative effect of perceived persuasion is Laran, Dalton and
Andrade’s (2011) study on people’s perceptions of advertisement slogans. Their research shows that the mere perception of a sentence as a slogan, which is commonly known to be an attempt to persuade its recipients, instead of perceiving it as a simple statement influenced the respondents’ attitudes to be counter-intentional of the advertising message, whilst the statement influenced the respondents in the desired direction.
The above described principle of resisting perceived persuasion or force was coined psychological reactance by Jack Brehm (1972). According to him the human need for self-determination leads to the motivation to reestablish free behavior, which in the case of a persuasion attempt has been threatened. Burgoon, Alvara, Grandpre and Voulodakis (2002) elaborated on this psychological principle and found that only certain types of persuasive
messages, namely forceful or intense messages that impose a specific desired behavior, are likely to arouse reactance. They furthermore established three types of reactance to messages.
Depending on how threatened the receiver feels he is likely to engage in simply ignoring the persuasive attempt to derogating the source, ending up with a similar behavior that was
previously described with the example of Laran et al. (2011): Engaging in more of the undesired behavior in order to demonstrate choice. Burgoon et al. (2002) fittingly named this reactant behavior the boomerang effect.
Since not only the strength of persuasion effect can be questioned, but also the direction of effect might be reversed, when receivers perceive a persuasive message as choice-threatening or simply persuasive, scholars have been looking to find ways in which this resistance to messages can be lowered in order to not encounter a reactant behavior. Whilst researchers have discussed whole strategies on how to counter reactance (Knowles & Linn, 2004), how to disrupt or minimize the perceived threat of an open persuasion (Fennis, Das & Pruyn, 2004), or even how to use reactance for one’s own advantage by applying reverse
psychology (Knowles & Linn, 2004), the most interesting realm of counteracting for this study is the strategy of preventing the receiver to recognize the persuasive attempt (Knowles & Linn, 2004; Matthes, Schemer & Wirth, 2007; Moyer-Guse, 2008; Green, Garst & Brock, 2004). One
of the most studied strategies to avoid the detection of the persuasion is the implementation of persuasive messages into entertainment narratives (Moyer-Guse, 2008; Green et al., 2004).
Connecting that prevalence of research on resistance to persuasion within entertainment with the reported development that documentaries are increasingly being watched for
entertainment purposes (Higgins, 2005), the research on resistance and persuasion becomes very important for the understanding of documentaries’ effects. Reminding oneself of Green, Garst and Brock’s (2004) finding that documentaries are a blurred medium, the need to detangle the possible ways of consuming and interpreting messages in documentaries becomes most crucial for further investigation. The changes in documentary production as well as consumption force any analysis to differentiate between various ways of how they influence interpretation. Building up on Higgins’ (2005) and Green, Garst and Brock’s (2004) ideas three broad different
categories of documentaries can be identified: Firstly proclaimed objective documentaries that are consumed with similar expectations and assumptions as news-articles. Secondly overtly partisan films, understood as media-campaigns and interpreted with all the connected reactions to persuasion. And lastly, especially induced by the changes in popular consumption, a new possibility to view documentaries as similar to pieces of entertaining narrative or even fiction arose. Deriving from this distinction and the help of Friestad and Wright’s (1994) PKM a scaled model can be developed that ranks the possible perceptions of persuasiveness and therefore implications for resistance within the three categories of interpretation.
3-Perspectives Model of Persuasion and Resistance within Documentaries
The perception of documentaries as biased forms of media campaigning clearly ranks highest in acknowledged persuasion attempts with its receivers. One can expect that receivers
perceive a documentary as most attempting to persuade if either the author, the channel of distribution or line of argumentation is openly biased or openly committed to a goal. One can therefore expect that receivers will interpret the messages as strong persuasion attempts, leading to a high recall of persuasion knowledge subsequently prompting a large amount of reactance towards the message goals if they are opposing previous attitudes of the receiver.
When documentaries are presented and interpreted as objective pieces of information or education, similar to a news report, one can expect that receivers will not interpret the messages as overtly persuasive as they would with the discussed form of interpretation as media campaign. Receivers are expected to only apply their persuasion knowledge when the line of argumentation is perceived as biased. This means that only a biased part of a documentary is expected to
provoke a reactance towards the message goals, whilst respondents might be more susceptible and less reactant to other less suspicious parts.
Lastly the identification of a documentary as a piece of art or entertainment should activate some if not all counter-reactance strategies, or as Moyer-Guse (2008) puts it, “an entertainment-education program is not perceived as having persuasive intent, it should
[therefore] not induce the kind of reactance that is often evoked by overtly persuasive messages” (p.415). The argument is mainly built on the idea that either a dramatic narrative or the focus on artistic appearance distracts the receivers from recognizing persuasive intent. In terms of
persuasion knowledge this suggests that receivers are not likely to cognitively engage and apply interpretations of persuasion attempts within the documentary, leaving one to expect that this form of consumption will provoke the least amount of reactance with its audience.
Applying this model to the specific study at hand one can expect the above mentioned perspectives of interpretation to have an effect on the attitudinal influence of a documentary. To put this in form of a hypotheses one can expect:
H3a: The more entertaining respondents perceive the documentary, the less resistant
they are towards the persuasive messages, and hence the more they change their attitudes in the previously desired directions. (Perceived entertainment will moderate the effect of the stimulus documentary on political attitudes.)
H3b: The more objective respondents perceive the documentary, the less resistant they
are towards the persuasive messages, and hence the more they change their attitudes in the previously desired directions. (Perceived objectivity will moderate the effect of the stimulus documentary on political attitudes.)
One should note that these hypotheses are based on the assumption that the stimulus documentary is evaluated with distinct differences in regards to objectivity and entertainment. It is therefore necessary to consider the installment of a control component: Respondents should be influenced towards perceiving the documentary as more entertaining, informative or persuasive. As discussed extensively in the M-Section a technique was used to influence the respondents’ contextual understanding and interpretation of the documentary. This method of influencing respondents’ evaluations of a message is called priming, a concept created by Salancik (1974). It stands for the psychological effect on individuals’ accessibility of information in one’s memory, subsequently influencing their information processing and evaluation of given topics. In this case this means that priming respondents with information about the context, in which the
documentary is broadcasted, should influence their perception about how informative, entertaining or persuasive the nature of this film is.
Taking the concepts of resistance and reactance at hand, a very specific dimension must be discussed considering the documentary of this study. As the film tends to use persuasive techniques and narratives that are usually found in popular conspiracy theories, it is important to address the issues of the general receptiveness to conspiracies, or how Craig and Gregory (1999) call it: the respondents’ Conspiracist Ideation. According to their findings, one can measure people’s susceptibility to believe commonly disregarded information and theories to be truthful. The higher this ideation is the more likely they are to believe in unrelated narratives, both non-fiction and non-fiction, with similarly arranged argumentations. In that same reasoning people with a low ideation are more likely to reject narratives as untrue, merely due the fact that they usually disregard stories with a similar structure of argumentation as untruthful. In the case of this documentary the implication is that people with such low conspiracy theory should have a higher reactance to the arguments of the documentary at hand because of it conspiracist-like
argumentation, hence allowing for smaller changes in attitudes.
Combining all hypotheses of this section, this research aims to test if a political
documentary has an effect on political attitudes and whether this effect is moderated by different evaluations of the documentary. A graphic summary always helps to clarify the nature and idea of this research. Figure 1 presents exactly that: A visualized model of all expected effects within this research.
Figure 1: Visualized model of expected effects
Methods Sample
Since Stroud (2007) found that the main concept connected to documentaries is the effect of selective exposure, it seems rational to focus on a sample that would be very likely to expose itself to the documentary voluntarily. Surely this selection diminishes the possibility to make widely generalizable claims within a large population that a randomized sample representing society as a whole could have done. However it can be assumed that the used purposeful sample is more representative to the actual audience of a documentary, hence measuring exactly that kind of population that would be exposed to the documentary in reality.
Given the limited resources for this research the sampling was based on a purposeful snowball technique. The two websites Top Documentary Films (http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/) and Documentary Addict
(http://documentaryaddict.com/), both aggregators for large databases of freely available documentaries online, were approached to recruit participants for the experiment and feature a link to the survey on their social media channels and websites. Furthermore participants of the
experiments were asked to share a link to the experiment on their respectable social media channels. Due to the pages’ and participants’ link-sharing the provided link appeared on 1,595 Facebook users’ newsfeeds and generated the desired sample size of N=301 within 7 days. Figure 2 presents one of the posts that was disseminated on social media.
Given the purposefulness of the sampling technique it is not surprising that a vast majority of 93.8% of the respondents find documentaries enjoyable. It is safe to assume that the purpose of the sampling was therefore effective. The two other most defining commonalities of this sample were that 90.1% had at least some college degree and 76.1% resided in Europe, 17.5% respectively in North America and 6.4% in the rest of the world. Furthermore the general composition of the sample is comprised as follows: 39.9% of the respondents were male and 58.1% were female. 87.4% of the entire sample was between 18 and 35 years old (Mean = 28;
Median = 24). This information makes it safe to say that the sample can be described as highly educated young adults form an Anglo-European culture setting who enjoy watching
documentaries.
This description is important to keep in mind when assessing any outcomes of the study. One should be aware that the trends are not necessarily applicable to the general public. A good example of that is the average attitude of the sample towards the Free Market Economy: Whilst 54.5% of the sample had negative sentiments against the idea of a Free Market whilst a randomized sample of the Pew Research Center’s (2009) Global attitudes project showed that throughout the population in Western Europe (UK, France, Germany and Italy) only 29% had negative sentiments against the Free Market economy. With taking this comparison only as an example, this means that all findings can only be reliably stated for the above mentioned sampling technique.
Research Design
In order to understand the affective processes of a documentary in most detail an
experiment seemed the most appropriate. Similar to the reasoning of how to choose the sample a purposeful selection of variables and possible influencers seemed more valuable than an
inclusion of all possible influencers that occur in a daily life. Therefore the choice fell on a simple repeated measure attitude test before and after a stimulus, in this case a short political documentary.
Since the experiment was conducted online it was crucial to find a conclusive piece of documentary that would not be too long for respondents to lose interest and drop out of the experiment and at the same time offer enough differentiated possibilities for respondents to
interpret the film in the three ways that were discussed in the theory section. The 6 minutes version of The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and Alfonso Cuaron
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSF0e6oO_tw) combined at least two of the three possible interpretations, namely as media campaign or as piece of entertainment. The journalist Jason Sondhi describes this short clip as follows: “Part documentary, half advertisement and in places an artistic short film, with a solid dose of agit-prop thrown in, The Shock Doctrine is a slick piece of media that employs a smorgasbord of filmic and graphic techniques.” (Sondhi, 2007) Whilst this film was originally produced to advertise a book with the same title, it does indeed mix film techniques common in documentary films, with artistic features usually found in entertainment films. At the same time the narrator makes a very overt persuasion attempt for people to take action. This left room enough for individual interpretations by the respondents according to their previous beliefs about documentaries as well as a great platform to prime respondents towards the three discussed models without having to show three different documentaries that would discuss the same topic. Figure 3 presents four screenshots of the documentary representing the mood and visual style:
And indeed an analysis of how the documentary was evaluated in the experiment showed that respondents agreed most with evaluating the documentary as informative (M=5.28,
SD=1.28) followed by finding it on average somewhat entertaining (M=4.95, SD=1.05). Respondents evaluated the objectivity significantly lower (M=3.54, SD=1.60). Nonetheless respondents liked the documentary somewhat on average (M=4.91, SD=1.64). These evaluations were useful to test whether former expectations about documentaries in general had any
influence on the actual perception of the documentary.
In order to systematically condense the narrative of the documentary into topic clusters that could possibly affect a certain sets of attitudes, a qualitative content analysis was used as the basis of understanding1. Every topic, public person or political theme was rated in regards to how central they were to the storyline, into what direction the position seemingly tried to push the audience into, and how rational or emotional that persuasive argumentation was. Using Zuwerink and Cameron’s (2003) summary of resistance strategies, possible strategies such as source
derogation, negative affect, biased assimilation or attitude bolstering were noted. Additionally descriptions of the perceived overtness of the persuasion attempt and possible interpretations in regards to entertainment and information value were stated. Based on the found focus topics and persuasiveness the film at hand can be roughly categorized into the theme of anti-capitalist/anti-elitist conspiracy theory.
The documentary starts off with a visually disturbing depiction of electric shock therapy as treatment for mental illness. Considering the level of negative excitement, this depiction could
1
possibly steer viewers into disapproving of shock treatment and into support of more agency for mentally ill patients. The argumentation follows moderately by relating the shock-therapy principle to interrogation techniques of the CIA. Again negatively if not disturbingly presented, such depiction seemed to aim to push viewers into disapproving of the CIA and its techniques. For further analysis it should be noted that both of these argumentation styles are mainly
leveraging on emotional appeal rather than cognitive information to persuade. A sudden change in perspective towards economic backgrounds and societal crises such as 9/11 and the 2004 Tsunami quickly spirals the argumentation into commonly used frames of elite domination of the common man. Whilst still keeping up the emotional appeal, the persuasion strategy clearly tries to appeal to rational arguments against the idea of a Free Market Economy, foreign military involvements and current politicians in power. In the same context demonstrations are somewhat depicted as tool against the powers of politicians and “free market oppression” and could
therefore influence viewers’ attitudes positively towards them. As a final element, historical context is shown in order to function as examples of the discussed theories. The contextual examples are flickering in fast frequency through the video, almost too quick to consciously process them, therefore rather overwhelming with possible emotional and affective responses rather than stimulating cognitive processes. Clustering all 51 individual topics into broad categories that could then be tested within a quantitative survey the following themes emerged: Mental Illness, The Free Market Economy, US Foreign Policy, Torture, Civil Disobedience and
Conspiracist Ideation. Furthermore the findings of this content analysis are used as the base for the creation for the sub-hypotheses of H12: H1a, H1b, H1c, H1d and H1e.
The quantitative survey3 was then built inquiring about the attitudes towards the above found categories. For the purposes of analysis all attitudes were asked on a Likert-scale (from 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree) measuring their agreement to 20 individual statements: As the focus of the documentary was not necessarily the stigmatization of mentally ill people itself, the focus of questions rather laid on the issue of shock therapy and normative implications of inflicting pain as doctors. The questions were built by using the documentary’s own
terminology asking the respondents about their agreement whether mentally ill patients should be able to decide what treatment to receive, whether they should have the same rights and
obligations as healthy people, and whether doctors should be allowed to inflict pain on for the treatment of mental illness. Similarly the topic of US foreign policy and government violence was not addressed directly but rather used as a tool to arouse emotions in order to set the mood. Therefore three statements about the agreement with US foreign policy, military force as solution in foreign crises and torture to save civilians, were asked to assess the respondents’ feelings about these out-of-focus attitudes.
The main focus of the documentary was found to be the discussion on use and necessity of the free market economy. In order to ensure comparability to other findings all questions regarding this cluster were taken from the economic testing part of the Pew Research Center’s
2
Find the hypotheses here: Previous Findings on Documentaries . 3
(2009) Global attitudes project. Considering the normative implications that the documentary made into account, measuring attitudes about the principles of democracy and civil participation reliably was more complex. As Bollen (1990) discusses it is hard to find reliable measures of what constitutes democracy let alone what individuals connote with that idea. Therefore the following statements aimed less at measuring attitudes about the global idea of democracy but rather about the connotations that came with the stimulus film: Respondents were asked to agree or disagree with whether democracy is the ideal system to govern people; politicians in their country have more power than they should; they have the ability to influence politics; and whether they felt that legal or illegal demonstrations are a good way to influence politics. Lastly, as discussed in H3 (p.12) statements controlling for Craig and Gregory’s (1999) Conspiracist Ideation were posed. Using question-sets from Craig and Gregory (1999) as well as Brotheron, French and Pickering (2013) four underlying dimensions of beliefs in conspiracies were being tested for. The first dimension consisted of statements that tested the respondents’
self-assessment about mistrust in authority and disadvantage in society. The other three dimensions were measured with statements about the beliefs in government conspiracies against their own citizens, small-group conspiracies to rule world politics and information control conspiracies to keep crucial information from the public.
In order to test whether the survey questions effectively measured the above discussed clusters in political attitudes a principal component analysis (PCA) was conducted on the 20 individual questions on the political attitudes with oblique rotation (promax). The KMO measure (.705) proved the sampling adequacy for the analysis (good according to Hutcheson &
Sofroniou, 1999). Deriving a threshold of factor loadings above 0.64, six clusters could be
retained. As expected in the planning of the survey these clusters were: 1 = Conspiracist Ideation (α = .73), made up from questions taken from Craig and Gregory’s (1999) work on attitudes on conspiracies, therefore a measurement of the respondents’ general receptiveness to conspiracies; 2 = Attitudes towards the Free market Economy (α = .81); 3 = Attitudes towards government violence (α = .67), made out of the attitudes towards torture, military force, and US foreign policy; 4 = Attitudes towards civil rights of Mentally Ill people (α = .62), which interestingly was not correlated to the opinions about whether a doctor should be able to inflict pain if deemed helpful for the treatment; 5 = Attitudes towards civil disobedience (α = .60), mainly made up by attitudes about legal and illegal demonstrations. Two other factors are made up from single questions, namely 6 = respondents’ self-perceived ability to change the course of their government and above mentioned 7 = opinion on whether pain should be allowed in order to treat mentally ill people. As the reported Cronbach’s alpha (α) show, all clusters showed a good internal consistency and were therefore reliable.
Besides inquiring about political attitudes the survey was also designed to find out about the respondents’ attitudes towards documentaries. Firstly a set of comparative questions was asked about the general preferences in different film genres to control for the sample purpose and find any irregularities regarding preferences. Secondly, based on of Higgins’ (2005) possible
4
Please turn to Factor loadings for clusters in Political Attitudesto view the exact Factor loadings and clusters.
classifications, a set of thirteen statements5 regarding expectations about the educational, entertaining or persuasive value of documentaries in general were posed to which the respondents indicated how far they agreed (Likert-scale: from 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree). Continuing to use the same scale format, respondents were asked to evaluate the documentary on 21 points after watching. These points constituted assessments of entertainment value, information value, level of objectivity and bias, liking of the documentary, and agreement with the social cause of the documentary.
Testing whether the survey questions effectively measured the above evaluation
measurements the answers were clustered via another PCA with oblique rotation (promax). The KMO measure (.902) showed that the sampling was more than adequate for the analysis
(excellent according to Hutcheson & Sofroniou, 1999). Extracting the variables with factor loadings above 0.76, five clusters could be retained. Concurring with the planned methods in the survey they can be named as following: 1 = Agreement with Information (α = .92), made up from attitudes about the informative value, societal benefit of the documentary, and agreement with the points made in the documentary; 2 = Perceived Entertainment Value (α = .89), made up by self-assessments about the respondents’ excitement and enjoyment as well as attitudes about the artistic and entertaining qualities of the film; 3 = Perceived Objectivity (α = .89); 4 = Topic Knowledge (only one answer); and 5 = Perceived level of persuasion (only one answer). These
5
For a complete overview please turn to Appendix 4 - Survey Questionnaire. 6
Please turn to Factor loadings for clusters in Stimulus Evaluation to view the exact Factor loadings and clusters.
tests prove that the planned clustering of political attitudes was successful. The Cronbach alphas showed a very high reliability.
Concerning the need to assure different interpretations of the documentary to test the 3-Perspectives Model primers were implemented as discussed in the theory section. In this case, priming respondents with information about the context in which the documentary was
broadcasted was aimed to influence their perception about how informative, entertaining or persuasive the nature of this film was going to be. As seen in figures A2a, A2b, and A2c7 the primers were aimed at contextualizing the documentary in the setting of a website that supposedly published the documentary: a) A simulation of the CNN World news website
presented a descriptive focus on the informational value, was expected to prime the respondents to evaluate the documentary as more informative; b) A simulation of the Occupy Movement’s website, a social activist group, with a focus on the argumentative and persuasive value, which was expected to prime respondents to evaluate the film’s content as more biased and persuasive; and c) A simulation of the Raindance film festival’s website with a focus on the documentary’s artistic value, which was expected to prime respondents to evaluate the film’s content as more entertaining than the other two primers.
Results
7
Please turn to Appendix 2 – P to view a full version of the primers as they were presented to the respondents.
Testing Adequacy of Methods
The respondents’ general expectations about documentaries indeed showed the blurred understanding of what makes up a documentary. Interestingly the majority of 95.3% watch documentaries to be educated but only 48.6% expect documentaries to be objective. Combined with the facts that 92.9% find an exciting narrative important and 74.9% find it important that a documentary is artistic, one can support Higgins’ (2005) categorization as a blurred media: People actively strive to be educated by documentaries, however also expect to be entertained. On top of that one half of the sample does see documentaries as an objective entity whilst the other half acknowledges its biased nature. In other words this was a direct validation of the 3-Perspectives Model (PPRD) assuming that people can interpret films within the genre
documentaries in a differentiated way. For the study this meant that people might evaluate the stimulus documentary in various ways, leaving the assumption that these evaluations might have an impact on the effects of the stimulus itself.
Regression analyses were conducted to test former expectations predicted the posttest evaluations of the stimulus documentary. Correlating these evaluations with another, a Regression analysis indicated that the perceived entertainment value and the perceived
objectivity explained 47.9% of the variance of liking the documentary (R²=.479, F(2,208)=95.66, p=.000). This means that perceiving the documentary as entertaining predicted liking of the documentary (β=.807, p=.000) as did perceiving the documentary as objective (β=.343, p=.000). Controlling for the influence of general expectations about documentaries one should state that a stated general enjoyment of documentaries does significantly influence the perceived
entertainment of the stimulus documentary (R²=.076, F(1,209)=17.19, p=.000)(β=.305, p=.000). Nonetheless the Regression analysis only explained about 7.6% of the variance in perceiving the
documentary as entertaining. Considering that this regression was the only significant one testing for influences on evaluations about entertainment one can state that the evaluation of this
documentary is barely influenced by general expectations towards documentaries.
Table 1: Summary of general evaluations of the stimulus documentary
Perceived Persuasion Perceived Entertainment Perceived Objectivity
N= Valid 245 246 246 Missing 56 55 55 Mean 4.77 4.82 3.70 Median 5.00 5.00 3.50 Std. Deviation 1.50 1.11 1.49 Variance 2.25 1.23 2.22
The evaluations of the stimulus documentary themselves are presented in table 4. Whilst the table gives an adequate overview how the documentary itself was assessed on average, the more important scores to look at are the variances of these means. For the purpose of testing the research model the small standard deviation and variance is to be seen negative. In other words, for an analysis to test whether the different evaluations had an effect on political attitudes the evaluations must be different enough. In the case of this sample respondents found the stimulus documentary overwhelmingly and homogeneously entertaining but rather not objective.
Subsequently the test for whether the primers induced the sample to give a differentiated evaluation of the documentary failed, although a small qualitative pretest (N=13), which had been conducted to assess, whether the primers would influence respondents in their evaluation of the documentary, suggested that a variance could be expected. The screenshots were shown to
pretest respondents, who were then informally questioned about their expectations and
evaluations of the documentary. The pretest suggested that the before mentioned expectations could be verified. However when analyzing the larger quantitative sample with three one-way ANOVAs to test for the effectiveness of the primers on the entertaining, objectivity and informative evaluations of the respondents, the only statistically significant difference was yielded with the test for perceived objectivity (F(2,208)=3.217, p =.042). A Post-Hoc test showed that the group that had seen the screenshot of the Occupy website evaluated the
objectivity lower (M =3.31,SD=1.29) than the groups that had seen the CNN website (M=3.86, SD=1.49) or the Sundance website (M=3.89, SD=1.49). The one-way ANOVAs for perceived entertainment (F(2,208)=1.117, p=.329) and perceived informational value (F(2,208)=.487, p=.730) showed that the group that had seen the Sundance website had a tendency to view the documentary as more entertaining and informative than the other two groups. These tendencies were however were not statistically significant. It is fair to say that the primers worked in the desired direction, however not effectively.
Figure 4: Visualization of the Influence of primers on the evaluation of the stimulus documentary
Correspondingly the primers did not significantly influence political attitudes. None of the ANOVAs conducted, that compared the attitudinal means, yielded big enough F-values or showed statistical significance. This means that the method of priming did not work to generate a significant variance of evaluations within the sample. In regards to the model this means that a controlled evaluation of the documentary was not possible, as seen in figure 5:
Perceived Entertainment Perceived Persuasion Perceived Objectivity
CNN 4.8443 4.64 3.875 Sundance 5.0468 4.56 3.8571 Occupy 4.8689 5.12 3.3115 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5 CNN Sundance Occupy
Figure 5: Research Model with focus on effect of primers (full line= significant; dotted line= not significant)
Testing Model Hypotheses Attitudes towards: Rights of Mentally Ill Attitudes towards: Free market Economy Attitudes towards: Governmen t Violence Attitudes towards: Democracy Attitudes towards: US Foreign Policy Conspiracist Ideation M before Stimulus 4.24 SD = 1.26 3.51 SD = 1.27 2.40 SD = 1.00 5.08 SD = 1.44 2.65 SD = 1.16 3.92 SD = .99 M after Stimulus 4.56 SD = 1.31 3.28 SD = 1.30 2.27 SD = .96 4.83 SD = 1.47 2.46 SD = 1.16 4.11 SD = 1.03 M difference + .32 - .23 - .13 - .25 - .19 + .19 t-value t = 5.765 t = -4.604 t = -4.131 t = -4.335 t = -4.254 t = 5.331 Significance p = .000 p = .000 p = .000 p = .000 p = .000 p = .000
Figure 6: Summary of statistically significant mean changes in political attitudes measured by paired sample-t-tests. All means were measured on a scale from 1(strongly disagree) to
7(strongly agree). N=209 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5
The measurements in figure 7 show that the stimulus documentary had a clearly negative and statistically significant impact on the respondents’ attitudes towards the free market
economy, government violence, democracy as ideal system and US foreign policy. Furthermore respondents showed a statistically significant more positive attitude towards the rights of
mentally ill people and conspiracy theories. The paired sample-t-test for attitudes towards cluster civil disobedience showed a slightly positive change from M=4.44, SD=1.19 to M=4.50,
SD=1.34 (scale from 1 to 7), however these observances were not statistically significant (t(209)=1.38, n.S. (p=.168)). Looking upon attitude changes for single questions the largest effect was measured for attitudes about inflicting pain on mentally ill if deemed helpful for their treatment. The mean changed from M=3.04, SD=1.51 to M=2.55, SD=1.55 (on a scale from 1 to 7) (t(210)=-6.71, p=.000). These findings validate hypotheses 1a (expected positive change towards the rights of mentally ill patients), 1b (expected negative change towards the idea of a free market economy) and 1c (expected negative change towards evaluation of democracy) however show that hypotheses 1d and 1e could not be proven to be statistically significant.8
In order to control for the Stroud’s (2007) found polarization effect on the outcomes of hypotheses 1a – 1e a closer look was taken at the previous political attitudes of the respondents. The scaled responses for pretest attitudes towards the Free Market Economy, Rights of Mentally ill patients, Government Violence, and Civil Disobedience were recomputed into dummy
variables, categorizing the answers into positive and negative attitudes. These new variables
8
For a presentation of all individual statements being tested please turn to Paired Sample t-Test for individual questions
made it possible to compare whether a previously negative attitude towards a topic would lower or even invert a positive effect of the documentary. A series of independent sample t-tests showed that respondents with positive attitudes towards the Free Market Economy (M=-.39, SD=.85) changed their attitudes significantly different than respondents with negative attitudes (M=-.06, SD=.64) (t(156)=2.813, p=.006), respondents with negative attitudes towards the rights of mentally ill patients (M=.56, SD=1.03) changed their attitudes significantly different than respondents with negative attitudes (M=.17, SD=.85) (t(171)=3.009, p=.003), and respondents with positive attitudes towards government violence (M=.86, SD=1.17) changed their attitudes significantly different than respondents with negative attitudes (M=-.11, SD=.47) (t(194)=3.853, p=.000). These results actually showed that respondents with positive attitudes towards the Free Market Economy changed more drastically into the negative direction than respondents with previously negative attitudes. The same finding was observed with attitudes towards mental illness, previously negative attitudes yielded a greater change towards the positive, and attitudes towards government violence, previously positive attitudes yielded greater change towards the negative. As these findings prove the opposite of what could be expected with polarization, hypothesis 2 can be rejected: All attitudinal changes occurred into the same direction.
Table 2: Summary of t-test on polarization effects
Attitude Change towards: Mean Change of previously positive Attitudes Mean Change of previously negative attitudes Difference in
Mean Change t df p-value
Free Market Economy - .391 - .056 .334 2.813 156 .009 Rights of Mentally Ill .170 .557 .387 3.009 171 .003 Government Violence - .857 - .109 .748 3.853 194 .000 Civil Disobedience .029 .026 .003 - .033 176 .974
Although the primers, in form of website screenshots, did not generate any direct and statistically significant mean differences in political attitudes a series of regression analyses were conducted to test whether different perceptions of entertainment and objectivity had an effect on changes in political attitudes. However none of the 28 regression analyses9 yielded statistical significance. The only analysis that was close to produce statistically significant results was a linear regression analysis to test the influence of perceived entertainment on the change in attitudes towards the free market economy (R²=.017, F(1,209)=3.62, p=.058)(β= -.089, p=.058). The missing significance of results leaves hypotheses 3a and 3b to be disproven with the current sample and study.
Figure 7 presents a visualized summary of the tested hypotheses and shows what implications they had on the model. An extensive explanation follows in the next chapter:
9
Please turn to Testing Effects of Evaluations on Change in Political Attitudesview a summary of all Regression analyses.
Figure 7: Summary of tested Hypotheses (Black = statistically significant; Red = not significant)
Discussion
Before discussing any found effects at large, one should keep the context of this study in mind. Considering the purposeful sampling due to a theoretical buildup on selective exposure, the findings are not generalizable to the broad public, but only applicable to the description of the sample: Highly educated young adults from an Anglo-European culture setting, who enjoy watching documentaries. Reminding oneself of the unusually high average of negative sentiment towards the Free Market Economy, it is not implausible that the sample in this study has more consistent irregularities compared to a truly randomized sample. Although tests showed that previous attitudes towards the Free market Economy influenced neither evaluations of the documentary nor any change in attitudes, it is possible that other prerequisites of the sample had impacts, which were not controlled for.
This paper has discussed the lack of research on documentaries at large. Building on the risen popularity and professionalization of this genre one can argue that it was overdue to shed more light on the underlying principles and effects of documentaries on their audiences. The first part of this research was therefore aimed to find empirical backing for this call to further focus on this genre by analyzing the general influence of political documentaries on political attitudes. Indeed the confirmation of most parts of Hypothesis 1 showed that the documentary at hand significantly affected its audience’s attitudes on political matters discussed in the documentary. Interestingly all attitudinal effects occurred in the expected direction. In other words a
documentary that depicted the democratic processes as flawed and more so overtly argued against the idea of a Free Market Economy, US Foreign Policy or government violence, stirred its audience to report significantly more negative attitudes towards all of the mentioned themes. Incidentally the largest attitudinal effect could be observed on a topic that was not central to the argumentative storyline: Used as a compelling narrative to emotionally touch the audience, the depiction of shock-treatment on mentally ill patients induced the largest shift in attitudes. This was taken as a first indication that the theory about strategies to overcome resistance (Moyer-Guse, 2008) could be confirmed: By removing the recognition of overt persuasion, the reactance seemed to be lowered, allowing for greater attitudinal changes.
When assessing the finding that all attitudinal changes occurred into the same direction, H2, which expected a clear polarization of attitudes, had to be rejected. Accounting for the existing research on documentaries by Stroud (2007) these findings surprised. It seems as if the documentary’s persuasion was especially strong with respondents who had previously stated opposing attitudes towards the direction the documentary tried to push for, indicating that posttest attitudes were mostly regulated by the stimulus documentary, rather than by previously
stated attitudes. This suggests that the documentary was very effective in moving its viewers to a very specific level of attitudinal strength. Surely one should not see this as an affirmative proof for the all so notoriously known Hypodermic Model (Bineham, 1988). Although the effects found are immense, one has to consider a large limitation of this research: The short interval between stimulus and attitudinal measurement. The findings clearly deliver no proof for any long term attitudinal effect. This means that the possibility exists that the effects of the documentary might dissolve, as soon as the film has left the conscious and cognitive memory of its viewers. Especially in regards to political attitudes most efforts of persuasion are aimed at long and sustainable changes of attitudes rather than the measured short term effect. Due to the limited resources it was impossible to conduct more measurements at a later point in time, examining long term effects. Whilst the current findings are still significant and suggest the previously stated implications, future research should account for the long term effects, controlling whether attitudinal changes are actually sustainable.
These findings open up new questions regarding the involved influence of resistance. On the one side, attitudes were affected by overt persuasion, and more so in a
unidirectional way, whilst on the other side even larger effects could be observed with topics that were positioned outside of the persuasive narrative. The resulting implications leave one to question how strong the involvement of resistance towards the persuasion actually was. Whereas the experimental method aimed to indicate resistance with the occurrence of attitude bolstering or polarization, as discussed in Zuwerink and Cameron’s (2003) work about resistance strategies, none of the two behaviors could be found with the respondents. Nonetheless one can argue that resistance, although slightly, could be observed: Non-persuasive parts of the narrative had a greater attitudinal effect than the overtly persuasive parts. In other words, the messages that tried
to persuade the audience with cognitive argumentation and examples affected attitudes less than messages that aimed to build up to the persuasive messages with emotionally compelling
imagery.
As H3, composed from the literature on effects of entertainment media (Moyer-Guse, 2008) and resistance strategies (Zuwerink & Cameron, 2003), suggested, the stronger effect of non-persuasive and artistic messages were anticipated in the design of this research. Conceptualizing the 3-Perspectives Model, the second part of this study was directly aimed to shed light on the moderators, perceived entertainment and perceived objectivity (RQ2). Focusing on the pure direction of observed effects one could see a suggested confirmation of the model: Higher perceived Entertainment predicted a more negative attitudinal change towards the Free Market Economy and US Foreign Policy whilst predicting a more positive attitude change towards Civil Disobedience. However none of these findings were statistically significant. The fact that most expectations actually occurred in the expected directions, can be taken as
indication that the model is correct, was however not tested properly. Analyzing the data for possible reasons of such statistical fallacy of the model one can assume that the main reason for such insignificance in results is the chosen documentary and its overall positive homogeneous evaluation by the audience. It becomes apparent that the decision to show a single documentary due to reasons of feasibility was hindering for the second part of the analysis. The audience evaluated the documentary too homogeneously, leaving no room for actual comparison. Whilst the limitations of showing only one stimulus were anticipated, the undertaking to counter this risk of homogeneity in form of showing primers before the actual stimulus did not work in the quantitative research.
Although a short qualitative pretest gave confidence that the broad quantitative sample would assess the entertainment value in different ways, the priming screenshots failed to stand up to the test in a statistically significant manner. The learnings from this are clear: In order to truly validate or disprove the 3-Perspectives Model further research must adjust the way people are influenced to perceive its entertainment and objectivity value. Since the priming of
respondents with simple information beforehand was not adequate enough to influence their perception, more resources should be spent on modifying the documentary itself in certain ways to cut either, entertainment or persuasion significantly. To give the example of this specific documentary, one version should exchange all artistic features, such as graphic stimulations and music with monotone pictures without music, whilst the other should cut the historic
explanations, letting the film appear more than a graphic novel rather than a traditional documentary.
Disregarding the statistical insignificance of the matter for a second, one is provided with a very informative set of results. Combining the specific assessments of the qualitative content analysis with the attitudinal effects of the stimulus, the hints towards a confirmation of the 3-Perspectives Model become strong enough to encourage a more resourced approach to statistically test the theory. Although most attitudinal clusters were affected in general, the largest attitudinal changes occurred with topics and themes that were not central to the
persuasive narrative: Because the depiction of electronic shock therapy on mentally ill patients was used as a stylistic mood-setter instead of adding logical support for the documentary’s aim to change people’s minds about democratic decision making processes, it was met with the least resistance, ergo the largest attitudinal shift. Similar observations can be made about attitudinal change towards US foreign policy.
Should the findings be proven statistically correct at a later point in time, the implications would be large for filmmakers and media professionals. Being aware that audiences seem to only focus on the main persuasion that they interpret as most overt, persuasive strategies can leverage on that. Especially in times in which people become more and more aware of advertising and persuasive strategies (Friestad & Wright, 1994) this limited attention can help to hide the true persuasive agenda. The key seems to be to make the main persuasive efforts of a movie appear to lie on a topic that one does not intend to change, whilst presenting the actual persuasive focus without any normative or judgmental intent. Viewers should only be prompted to process the actual persuasion in the peripherals of their cognitive ability, whilst they are busy defending their attitudes against a persuasion that is not even meant to succeed. Being aware of these
implications for embedded persuasive strategies within entertainment media, I suggest to media analysts and regulators to spend more efforts on analyzing seemingly peripheral and unintended parts of the narratives, as they can actually influence their audience larger than the central ones.
All in all, this study should be seen as the first basic step to analyze the genre
documentaries. A basic model for understanding the complex components of the genre, namely the 3-Perspectives Model, was created. Having established the three possible paradigms of interpretation, objective truth reporting, biased media campaigning, and mere entertainment without informational value, the next future step is to find adequate ways to reliably test the hypotheses. Although none of the tests for the moderating influence of entertainment and objectivity yielded significant results, the effect directions and the presented theoretical
background from other realms of media studies give confidence that a study with more resources and timely possibilities could quite possibly result in more significant outcomes. Especially the finding that different topics, which were not part of the main persuasive narrative, induced a
greater change in attitudes than the overtly persuasive topics shows that the hypotheses are on the right track and merely need more sophisticated attention.
If these suggestions should not be compelling enough, the general attitudinal shifts caused by the documentary should be more than enough reason to gain more scholarly interest for documentaries. After all documentaries have arrived in the mainstream and political actors increasingly use them. The more effort political and social groupings put into producing this mix made out of campaign, entertainment and news-information, the more important it becomes for people to understand what effects documentaries can possibly have on attitudes, and why.
One thing is for certain: In the third age of communication (Blumler & Kavanagh, 1999) political campaigners with persuasive intent will most definitely try to leverage on any hint of attitude-changing effect that they could possibly use. Furthermore the time has passed in which only well-established professionals, with proper ethical codes and training, have the means to distribute their material to large audiences. The risk is too high that malicious communicators, who were previously barred to the fringes of society, now experiment and eventually succeed in using new powerful persuasion-techniques before they are fully understood by scientists.
Regulators and concerned citizens cannot afford to be left in the dark about the possible implications of the findings discussed in this study.
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