cultivation: a standalone construct

In communication research, cultivation is the gradual way that heavy television viewing shapes a person's picture of social reality toward the world shown on screen. George Gerbner and Larry Gross introduced the idea in their 1976 violence profile, arguing that people who watch a great deal of television come to see the real world as more dangerous than it is, a pattern later called the mean world syndrome. The effect is slow and cumulative rather than sudden, working over years of viewing rather than from a single program. Gerbner and colleagues later described these cultivation processes in detail, treating television as a steady storyteller that homogenizes what its heavy viewers take to be normal. The referent here is a media effect on belief, measured in surveys, and it has nothing to do with growing organisms, working soil, or forming one's own character.[1][2]

Unit

A viewer's belief about the social world, in survey responses

Recovery means

Effects build slowly and cumulatively; whether they fade when heavy viewing stops is not well established

Measured by

By comparing the survey answers of heavy and light television viewers, holding other factors constant