When the viewer goes to prison: learning fact from watching fiction. A qualitative cultivation study

Abstract

Previous research suggests that effects of television fiction on the perception of reality are coding errors occurring when viewers remember what they saw without remembering the validity of the source. A qualitative study of 33 prison inmates discussing their first entry into the prison system shows that when experiences which previously were of secondary importance suddenly and acutely become of primary importance, people explicitly and actively use knowledge gained from television fiction as a means to learn about and anticipate what will happen in realities that are otherwise inaccessible. First timers expected a real Flemish prison to resemble the prisons from American TV and movie fiction. The article argues that audiovisual fiction contains cues that suggest that some of what is shown resembles reality.