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Hypodermic Needle and Limited Effects
Theories
The concern for the potential social effects of mass media has been
present since the advent of the press, television, film, radio and
now the Internet. Researchers have developed various interpretations
and theories addressing the impact of media on the audience, in
an attempt to explain this relationship, which is still in debate.
The Magic Bullet Theory originated in the 1930’s, believes
that the audience is impressionable, passive and equally susceptible
to media messages. This notion of mass audience is highly influenced
by the definition of mass society, at the time, with the increase
of modernization, industrialization and urbanization believed to
be the culprits of rising criminality (Reis, 1998). The media is
assumed to have the ability to influence the masses and persuade
public opinion toward any given subject, depending on the author
of the text. The belief is that messages are like “magic bullets”,
they strike all members of the audience uniformly, creating even
effects among them. Likewise, the “Hypodermic Needle Theory”
shared the same premise. Audiences are injected with a “shot”
of information, which is believed to be capable of equally affecting
audience’s thinking and behavior. The classical example that
illustrates this theory is the Orson Welles’s radiobroadcast
“The Invasion from Mars” in 1938. In the eve of Halloween,
a radio broadcast is interrupted with information that Martians
have begun an invasion of earth in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. People
actually believe that a serious invasion is in progress, establishing
panic in households and in the streets. The effect of this broadcast
suggestes how the theory works; a shot of information by the media
is able to influence a more vulnerable audience in a uniform manner.
Studying the panic provoked from this broadcast Hadley Cantril (1947)
surveys listeners of the program in an attempt to understand why
some listeners confused the fictional program with a real news bulletin.
Results indicate that the reason some listeners do not verify the
authenticity of what they are listening to on the radio is their
preexisting mind sets, which make it possible for them to understand
what is being broadcasted. High religiosity and beliefs about the
end of the world are some of the factors that are raised about what
made the program believable.
A prominent critic of the “Hypodermic Needle” model
is Paul Lazarsfeld, an Austrian born scholar who arrives in the
United States in 1933, and has a decisive role in the development
of communication and social studies (Katz, 1987). Lazarsfeld and
his colleagues at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia
University develop the “limited effects theory” based
on studies about opinion formation in the presidential elections
in the United States and about the influence of opinion leaders
in the communication process. Their theory posites that media messages
have only indirect and limited effects on the public; to be more
effective these messages need to be mediated by opinion leaders.
Therefore, the idea of the powerful media is debunked, and it is
concluded that there are several intervening variables that mediated
the media-audience connection. Lazarsfeld and his group then created
the “two-step flow of communication” model, which states
that ideas flow from the media to opinion leaders and from them
to less active sections of the population. In this relationship,
the tendency of the media is to reinforce predispositions, rather
than change them. Therefore, individuals only search for information
that goes with their beliefs, avoiding media content that challenge
their position, determining a process of “selective exposure”
(Czitrom, 1982).
Critics of the limited effects model link Lazersfeld’s research
to the media industry and to government money as important financial
sources, which according to them, might have an influence on the
selection of the respondents and questions asked to them (Noelle-Neuman,
1983; Simpson, 1993).
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