Discuss your agreement or disagreement with television journ

Discuss your agreement or disagreement with television journalism using more entertainment methods.

Solution

In an average week, the typical American spends approximately 38 hours watching television shows and movies, 8 hours reading books, magazines, and newspapers, and 18 hours listening to recorded music and radio (Motion Picture Association of America, 2007). Assuming the average person sleeps eight hours a night, people spend roughly 55% of their waking hours attending to entertainment media. Americans spend almost as much of their annual incomes on entertainment as they do on health care, and more money is spent on entertainment than on education, personal care, and charitable donations. Of the money spent on entertainment, cable and satellite TV account for 39%, books, magazines, and newspapers for 23%, movie consumption for 19%, recorded music for 6%, and Internet, video games, mobile content, and satellite radio combined for 13%.

Considering that entertainment media are nearly ubiquitous, it is astonishing that they have received so little attention in personality and social psychology. Indeed, of the nearly 15,000 articles published between 1932 and 2008 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,Journal of Personality, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, “television,” “movie,” “film,” “music,” “book,” “magazine,” or “media” were listed as subject headings in only 90 of them—a mere 0.6%. Many psychologists have argued that researchers need to broaden their research foci and pay more attention to ordinary aspects of people\'s daily lives so that we can develop an understanding of social behavior that is more ecologically sensitive. Entertainment is undoubtedly important to people and permeates many aspects of social life, yet we know little about it. The present work was designed to explore the landscape of this undeveloped terrain with the aim of establishing a foundation on which to develop and test hypotheses about the psychology of entertainment preferences.