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Media affects us in interesting and not always straightfoward ways. Image: Flickr/mike@bensalem cc license

Usually when scientists wonder if something affects something else, they set up a randomized control trial some people get stuff and some people get not stuff and then they watch with bated breath and spreadsheets to see how these two groups differ. But you cant exactly prescribe a long-term course of more, less or even different media (for one thing, people who stick to the program are just too naturally different from those who wont to make any results meaningful). And so instead of randomized control trials, scientists are increasingly turning to natural experiments to explore things like long-term media consumption that you cant approximate in the lab or prescribe in life. These natural experiments just happen to split people into stuff and not stuff groups, without researchers doing the splitting.

One of the pioneers of this approach is UCSD economist Gordon Dahl. I interviewed Dahl about one of his natural experiments the data-driven observation that an unexpected home-team football loss leads to a spike in domestic violence in the teams home city for my book, Brain Trust. A recent review by Dahl in the journal Family Relations uses the natural experiments to discover how media affects families.

For example, Dahl points to a study showing that due to the happenstance of Indonesias topography, some villages have better TV signal strength than others. Independent of how far these villages were from major cities, or any other factor the researchers could imagine, citizens of cities with better TV signals had less involvement in community organizations. The papers somewhat doomsday title is Do Television and Radio Destroy Social Capital?

On the flip side, take a similar study of 180 villages in India researchers watched as some of these villages got cable television for the first time. And as cities got this digital view of the wider world, acceptance of domestic violence decreased, women experienced more autonomy and the be-cabled villages had lower fertility rates than their otherwise equal but de-cabled counterparts. This papers decidedly more upbeat title is Cable Television Raises Womens Status in India.

So the amount of media we consume certainly affects us in interesting and not always straightforward ways. But what about the content of the media we watch?

Well, in 2005 the Brazilian network Rede Globo produced nearly all of the countrys soap operas. But some parts of the country had Rede Globo and others didnt. Dahl points to a study showing that as communities got soap operas, their rates of divorce rose and their rates of fertility dropped. Children born in Rede Globo communities were much more likely to share characters names. And those dropping fertility rates? While they dropped among all young women in the viewing demographic, they dropped most among women closest in age to the soap operas main characters any given year.

So how does media exposure affect families in the United States? To answer that question, Dahl points to a recent study that looked at the intelligence of kids as television became available in U.S. counties in the 1940s and 1950s. Due to the random introduction of television, some kids had more years of exposure than others like a serendipitous randomized control trial, some kids got stuff and some kids got not stuff and there was no measurable difference between the groups except for stuff, which in this case was TV.

As youd expect it turned out that TV rots kids brains.

Actually thats not true at all. Dahl writes that, each additional year of childhood exposure to television increased test scores during adolescence by 0.02 percent of a standard deviation.

More here:
Natural Experiments Show Media's Effects on Families