The Role of Television in the Construction of Consumer Reality

This article presents the results of a two-study inquiry into a particular type of consumer socialization: the construction of consumer social reality via exposure to television. In study 1, estimates of the prevalence of products and activities associated with an affluent lifestyle were positively related to the total amount of television respondents watched. The amount of television viewing was shown to function as a mediating variable between the demographic variables income and education and the affluence estimates. In study 2, which consisted of student participants who were either very heavy or very light soap opera viewers, heavy viewers again provided higher estimates of the prevalence of the same types of products and behaviors measured in study 1. In addition, heavy soap opera viewers constructed their estimates significantly faster than light viewers, which suggests that relevant information is more accessible in memory for heavy viewers than light viewers. The results are consistent with heuristic processing strategies, particularly the availability heuristic, in which individuals infer prevalence from the ease of retrieval of relevant examples (Tversky and Kahneman 1973).