The Problem: A Critical Dismantling of My Disciplinary Location

Media psychology emerged primarily in mid-twentieth-century North America and Western Europe, embedded in a positivist scientific tradition that prized prediction, control, and generalizability. What Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan (2010) famously identified as the WEIRD problem: the behavioral sciences have been built predominantly on samples drawn from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies, and researchers have unjustifiably generalized these findings to all of humanity. Henrich et al. (2010) demonstrated that WEIRD subjects are frequent outliers when compared to the global distribution of human experience, particularly on constructs central to my research. The problem runs deeper than sampling. Media psychology’s default theoretical vocabulary is saturated with liberal humanist assumptions.

Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding framework (1980) reveals that the discipline’s own “preferred readings” of what media does to people are ideologically laden. Media psychology pushes a preferred meaning: that media’s primary effects are cognitive and affective, located inside individual brains, and measurable through survey instruments validated on Western samples. This preferred reading marginalizes structural, political, and cultural explanations of how media operates in people’s lives. Media psychology has been remarkably slow to engage with racialized and marginalized users’ experiences of digital media. Crenshaw’s (1989) framework of intersectionality has been formally acknowledged in many media psychology papers, but rarely operationalized in ways that preserve its critical depth.

The classical media effects theories that form the second pillar of my sub-disciplinary location each carry significant historical baggage. Cultivation theory, in its original formulation, rested on assumptions of audience passivity that sit uneasily with evidence of active, interpretive, and even oppositional media engagement, precisely the kind Hall’s (1980) encoding/decoding model was designed to theorize. The theory was developed primarily in the United States, tested on predominantly White American samples, and has shown limited replicability in non-U.S. media ecologies. Its implicit universalism reflects the same WEIRD bias that plagues media psychology more broadly.

Social comparison research has generated some of the most cited evidence in the social media and well-being literature. Yet a critical reading reveals that social comparison theory individualizes what are structural phenomena. A young Black woman comparing herself to algorithmically amplified white beauty standards is not simply engaging in a cognitive error she can correct with media literacy training; she is navigating a media ecology shaped by racial capitalism. Social comparison theory, without intersectional analysis, cannot see the structural forces that make some comparisons far more damaging than others. I do not claim these traditions have no value. Cultivation theory’s fundamental insight about sustained media exposure shaping perceptions of social reality remains empirically supported. My critique is not that these frameworks should be abandoned, but that they need rigorous interrogation and supplementation with structural and cultural analysis before they can responsibly guide research that claims to reveal the experiences of a diverse global public.

Confronting these limitations compels me to make commitments in how I design, conduct, and interpret my research. Diversifying sampling and resisting WEIRD universalism. The most immediate corrective is to prioritize sampling that moves beyond convenience samples of predominantly White, college-educated, North American young adults. Platform-level analysis alongside individual-level modeling is needed. I intend to infuse measures of platform-specific affordances. In developing the instruments, I will employ participatory scale development procedures, conducting qualitative interviews with participants from diverse backgrounds before finalizing items, to ensure constructs are experientially meaningful for the populations I am studying.

References

Bhatia, S., & Priya, K. R. (2018). Decolonizing culture: Euro-American psychology and the shaping of neoliberal selves in India. Theory & Psychology, 28(5), 645-668.

Bowleg, L. (2021). Evolving intersectionality within public health: from analysis to action. American journal of public health, 111(1), 88-90.

Horkheimer, M., Adorno, T. W., & Noeri, G. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford University Press.

Crenshaw, K. W. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine (pp. 139–168). In University of Chicago legal forum (Vol. 1).

Gramsci, A. (2020). Selections from the prison notebooks. In The applied theatre reader (pp. 141-142). Routledge.

Fornäs, J. (2024). Stuart Hall (1973)‘encoding and decoding’. In Classics in media theory (pp. 151-165). Routledge.

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?. Behavioral and brain sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.

Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. In Algorithms of oppression. New York university press.

Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform Capitalism. Polity Press, Cambridge Malden, MA.