Summary
Cultivation theory holds that long-term, repeated exposure to television gradually shapes people’s sense of what the world is like. It was developed by the communication researchers George Gerbner and Larry Gross, and set out in their 1976 paper ‘Living with Television: The Violence Profile’. Its unit is the whole viewing diet, not any single programme: heavy viewers tend to see the world as more dangerous than light viewers do, Gerbner’s ‘mean world syndrome’.
The effect is small but steady. A 2021 meta-analysis by Hermann, Morgan and Shanahan put it at .107 across five decades, implying “an enduring relationship between television’s message system and viewers’ conceptions of social reality”.
Rationale
Same word, different sense: Gerbner’s cultivation is what a media diet does to viewers; ours is the tending of contexts. His findings suggest repetition counts, though media is one context among many.