Electronic media and social behavior

Social behavior has typically been seen as a changing of behaviors relevant to the situation at hand, acting appropriately with the setting one is in. However, with the advent of electronic media, people began to find themselves in situations they may have not been exposed to in everyday life. Novel situations and information presented through electronic media has formed interactions that are completely new to people. While people typically behaved in line with their setting in face-to-face interaction, the lines have become blurred when it comes to electronic media. This has led to a cascade of results, as gender norms started to merge, and people were coming in contact with information they had never been exposed to through face-to-face interaction. A political leader could no longer tailor a speech to just one audience, for their speech would be translated and heard by anyone through the media. People can no longer play drastically different roles when put in different situations, because the situations overlap more as information is more readily available. Communication flows more quickly and fluidly through media, causing behavior to merge accordingly.

Media has also been shown to have an impact on promoting different types of social behavior, such as prosocial and aggressive behavior. For example, violence shown through the media has been seen to lead to more aggressive behavior in its viewers. Research has also been done investigating how media portraying positive social acts, prosocial behavior, could lead to more helping behavior in its viewers. The general learning model was established to study how this process of translating media into behavior works, and why. This model suggests a link between positive media with prosocial behavior and violent media with aggressive behavior, and posits that this is mediated by the characteristics of the individual watching along with the situation they are in. This model also presents the notion that when one is exposed to the same type of media for long periods of time, this could even lead to changes within their personality traits, as they are forming different sets of knowledge and may be behaving accordingly.

In various studies looking specifically at how video games with prosocial content effect behavior, it was shown that exposure influenced subsequent helping behavior in the video-game player. The processes that underlay this effect point to prosocial thoughts being more readily available after playing a video game related to this, and thus the person playing the game is more likely to behave accordingly. These effects were not only found with video games, but also with music, as people listening to songs involving aggression and violence in the lyrics were more likely to act in an aggressive manner. Likewise, people listening to songs related to prosocial acts (relative to a song with neutral lyrics) were shown to express greater helping behaviors and more empathy afterwards. When these songs were played at restaurants, it even led to an increase in tips given (relative to those who heard neutral lyrics).