Describe a theory that best gives insight on Americas love affair with reality television shows. Please read the post and then give feedback to the person of what you thought about their post.

Describe a theory that best gives insight on Americas love affair with reality television shows.
Please read the post and then give feedback to the person of what you thought about their post.

Post 1

This week we were asked to describe a theory that best gives insight on Americas love affair with reality television shows. It is a phenomenon that is not generation specific or even gender or age based. This country seems to really love watching the lives of other people. I think the psychological theory that best describes this phenomenon would be the psychoanalytical idea the id in conjunction with Albert Bandura’s Social – Cognitive Learning Theory. The three parts, in particular, for this discussion are, observational learning, outcome expectancy and self regulation.

The id contains the basic psychic energy and motivations, often termed instincts or impulses. (Friedman 64) The id’s main motivation is the pleasure principle, meaning that it does what it feels is best for the individual to reduce stress and satisfy itself. This basically means that if a person observes others having care free fun or acting as though all is right with the world it is going to want it as well, regardless of the consequences. This is what makes reality tv so exciting. For the most part, everyone in the show gets what they want with a happy ending.

Observational learning, or modeling, is “learning by an individual that occurs by watching others perform the behavior, with the individual neither performing the behavior nor being directly rewarded or punished for the behavior.” (Friedman 236) I believe this is a good example of pop culture based off of reality tv. We binge watch the episodes and somehow learn the behavior of these people and adopt it as our own. Enough people watch and then it becomes a norm. Trend setting then becomes a very real thing with these shows. One of the biggest examples is from Jersey Shore. As a nation, millions of watchers learned new lingo and social norms. For example, if I were to say “GTL” my wife would know I mean Gym, Tan and Laundry and of course you can not forget the number one dance move “The Fist Bump”. Coast to coast we were copying these people as though we were right there with them. We had not grown up with them but we now partied and talked just like them.

Outcome expectancy is another important part of the reality watching drive. Through all the shows we partake in, we generally only adapt to what we perceive as good/positive behavior. This can be anything from the right ways to train your dog with Cesar Milan or maybe clothing choices after an episode of What Not to Wear.” Keeping with the Jersey Shore, this is more likely that if we drink the right drinks say the right words or even go to the right places we will have fun like they do.

Finally, our id is controlled with self regulation. This is “monitoring one’s own behavior as a result of one’s internal processes of goals, planning, and self-reinforcement.” (Friedman 240) Basically, if we do not get the desired outcome or reaction with our new modeled behavior we will, again, turn our behavior to get the desired outcome.

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