Television's cultivation of material values

Prior research has shown that television viewing cultivates perceptions of the prevalence of societal affluence through a memory-based process that relies on the application of judgmental heuristics. This article extends this research by examining (1) whether cultivation effects generalize to consumer values such as materialism and (2) whether these values judgments are also processed in a heuristic manner. Data from both a survey and an experiment suggest that television cultivates materialism through an online process in which television's influence is enhanced by active (rather than heuristic) processing during viewing. This finding stands in contrast to the cultivation of prevalence judgments, which are attenuated by active processing during judgment elicitation.