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Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsWatching 'Jersey Shore' might make you dumber, study suggests
Replace "might" with "definitely". Fortunately I've never watched that crap, but then again there's no telling how much dumber The Lounge makes us.
By Melissa Dahl
Take note, fans of mindless reality shows like "Jersey Shore": New research suggests watching something dumb might make you dumber. In other words, you are what you watch.
It's called media priming -- the idea that the things we watch or listen to or read influence our emotions and our behavior, perhaps more than we realize. This particular study may be the first to use fictional characters in a narrative to show an effect on people's cognitive performance, says lead author Markus Appel, a psychologist at Austria's University of Linz.
In an experiment, volunteers were told to read a fake screenplay about a character they refer to as a "foolish soccer hooligan." (A subsequent finding of the study: Austrians are adorable.) The story describes a day in the life of a man named Meier: He wakes up, reads (and misunderstands) the message in an inspiration-of-the-day calendar, meets his friends in a bar and gets very drunk. Meier then goes to a soccer game, gets into a fight and comes home to crash; he sleeps through the next day. (Substitute the soccer game for a nightclub, and you have something very similar to the televised daily shenanigans of Snooki or The Situation.)
Take note, fans of mindless reality shows like "Jersey Shore": New research suggests watching something dumb might make you dumber. In other words, you are what you watch.
It's called media priming -- the idea that the things we watch or listen to or read influence our emotions and our behavior, perhaps more than we realize. This particular study may be the first to use fictional characters in a narrative to show an effect on people's cognitive performance, says lead author Markus Appel, a psychologist at Austria's University of Linz.
In an experiment, volunteers were told to read a fake screenplay about a character they refer to as a "foolish soccer hooligan." (A subsequent finding of the study: Austrians are adorable.) The story describes a day in the life of a man named Meier: He wakes up, reads (and misunderstands) the message in an inspiration-of-the-day calendar, meets his friends in a bar and gets very drunk. Meier then goes to a soccer game, gets into a fight and comes home to crash; he sleeps through the next day. (Substitute the soccer game for a nightclub, and you have something very similar to the televised daily shenanigans of Snooki or The Situation.)
http://bodyodd.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/13/6851542-watching-jersey-shore-might-make-you-dumber-study-suggests
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Watching 'Jersey Shore' might make you dumber, study suggests (Original Post)
Major Nikon
Mar 2012
OP
RebelOne
(30,947 posts)1. I can truthfully state that I have never watched it nor had any desire to see it. n/t
lunatica
(53,410 posts)2. I swear my IQ goes up whenever I listen to Thom Hartmann
Now it's beginning to do that too when I listen to Rachel Maddow.
Who knew it could work both ways.
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)3. Imagine how dumb it would make you if you were actually on it.
femmocrat
(28,394 posts)4. That POS show is surprisingly popular with my students.
They are only in middle school! Where the hell are their parents???
XemaSab
(60,212 posts)5. I like it in part because it's a cautionary tale for our time
DON'T BE THESE PEOPLE!
pscot
(21,024 posts)6. Jersey's 15 minutes has got to be about over. Right?