The Psychology of Newspapers: Five Tentative Laws

Abstract

ONLY in recent years have psychologists commenced seriously to study communications. Distinguished beginnings have been made in the areas of radio and cinema; but as yet the psychology of newspapers has received but little attention. We are not forgetting the large array of brilliant memoirs, critiques, and histories of journalism, replete with sparkling apperfus of a psychological order. But these intuitive insights, dazzling as they often are, lack the wider application and additive power of sustained research. Desiring to investigate the psychological relation between newspapers and their readers in the two-fold process of expressing and forming opinion, we sought an event that would have the following characteristics: (a) it should involve a major issue of public policy and be typical of opinion formation in our democracy; (b) the event should have a datable beginning and end; (c) the alignments in opinion should be, so far as possible, of an ad hoc nature so that relatively few of the variables involved would be hidden in the dim recesses of personality and in past habits of partisanship. The issue selected as fulfilling these criteria in sufficient degree was the Neutrality Act that gripped the attention of America in the fall of I939.' Since our interest lies exclusively in the relation between certain representative newspapers and their readers, we shall not discuss the historical and political aspects of the Neutrality Act, nor the processes of newsgathering and news dissemination, nor the internal structure of the papers employed in our analysis. Our purpose is simply to draw from the analysis tentative psychological principles that are subject to confirmation or disproof by later investigators. If confirmed, these principles will become valid general laws, thus aiding in the establishment of a systematic psychology of newspapers. This investigation is based upon a complete sample of weekday and Sunday editions of English-language newspapers published in Boston.2