IN SPITE OF DEBRIEFING - IMPACT OF MASS-M EDIA ON THE RELEVANCE OF THE ISSUE VIOLENCE IN SCHOOLS

This study deals with the impact of certain kinds of presentation in m ass media on students' judgment of social developments. N = 138 studen ts read a newspaper article on the issue ''violence in school'' which presented one of three tendencies (increasing vs. stagnating vs. decre asing amount of violence). The articles were written as single case de scriptions or as statistical summaries. Changes in judgments (compared to a control group) were obtained for subjects who read the ''decreas ing''-article. Reading about this positive trend leads to lower estima tions of the relevance and extent of the problem than the other trends do. This discrepancy in judgments was higher when students read the ' 'single case''-article than after reading the more statistical summary . In a second step it was shown that even after a debriefing of the ma nipulation, the differences due to the tendencies remain stable: Stude nts who read ''decrease''-articles persevere in their low estimation o f the relevance and the magnitude of violence in schools, in spite of the low trustworthiness of this articles. The results are discussed wi th regard to the relative importance of negativity/positivity and expe ctancy disconfirmation on the persuasive effects of information.