Is Reality TV a Bad Girls Club? Television Use, Docusoap Reality Television Viewing, and the Cultivation of the Approval of Aggression

Abstract

In this study, associations between overall amount of television viewing as well as viewing of reality programs featuring adults in romantic, friendship-oriented, or familial settings and the approval of physical and verbal aggression are examined. Consistent with genre-specific cultivation theory, findings among 248 U.S. adult survey respondents show the ability of exposure to docusoap reality television as well as its perceived reality to predict normative beliefs about aggression, even under multiple controls. Additional analyses explore differences between men and women in the sample and explore approval of female-perpetrated compared with male-perpetrated aggression.