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Communication Research
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Making Television Reality

Unconscious Processes in the Construction of Social Reality

MICHAEL A. SHAPIRO

ANNIE LANG

One psychological mechanism that people may use to construct social reality is a reality-monitoring procedure with which they may relatively automatically and unconsciously select relevant event memories in constructing a picture of the world. Contextual information stored with the event memories is one element used to determine the relevance of a memory. Both preattentive psychophysiological responses and higher-order cognitive responses to the stream of television events are likely to be stored with television event memories. Both psychophysiological and cognitive processing of television events are examined to see what kinds of contextual information might be stored as a result of both real and fictional television events and mediated and unmediated television events. Then the decision processes that use this information are examined. It seems likely that television may result in contextual information that is potentially confusing to the reality-monitoring process. The resulting reality-monitoring errors may explain how memories of some fictional or irrelevant television events come inadvertently to influence a person's judgments about the real world. Several suggestions for testing this theory are made.

Communication Research, Vol. 18, No. 5, 685-705 (1991)
DOI: 10.1177/009365091018005007
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