In 1925, Lazarfeld obtained his doctorate's degree in philosophy major in applied mathematics at the University of Vienna, where he founded a research institute for applied social psychology four years later. In 1933, he went to the United States and served as the Director of the Office of Radio Research at the Princeton University after receiving a research grant in psychology from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1940, his project was transferred at the Columbia University where his office was renamed the Bureau of Applied Social Research.
With Hadly Cantril and Frank Stanton, Lazarsfeld is remembered for his detailed investigation of the radio habits of the American listening public. This investigation led to the famous radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds” in 1938. Orson Welles borrowed freely from H. G. Welles's novel and created a radio drama that resemble to news stories. One out of six listeners believed that aliens had invaded the universe and eventually panicked. The invasion from Mars panic was seen by elite observers as a definitive proof of mass society theory, that is, if a radio program could induce such wide-spread panic, obvious and concerted propaganda messages could do much worse.
Lazarsfeld affirmed that many listeners acted hastily and that simulated news stories were trusted without question, especially the eyewitness reports and the interviews with phony experts. He also concluded that media audiences have one or more psychological traits that made them especially susceptible to media influence: fatalism, phobic personality, emotional insecurity, and lack of self-confidence.
At the Princeton University, Stanton, Cantril, and Lazarsfeld were part of a vanguard of social scientists who slowly formulated new views of how media influence society. They argued that media were no longer feared as instruments of political oppression and manipulation because the public itself was viewed as very resistant to persuasion and extremist manipulation. They believe that most people were influenced by others rather than by media; opinion leaders in every community, who, at every level of society, were responsible for guiding and stabilizing politics. Media were conceptualized as relatively powerless in shaping public opinion in the face of more potent intervening variables like people's individual differences and group memberships.
Lazarsfeld pioneered the use of surveys and experiments to measure media influence, which, in turn, provided evidence that media rarely and indirectly influence individuals. He assumed that media effects were quite limited because in the more micro, or in the individual level, only a limited number of listeners were directly affected.
It should be noted, however, that Lazarsfeld and his colleagues, like Carl Hovland, were not theorists; they were methodologists. Unlike mass society theorists who assumed that media were quite powerful, they employed empirical social research methods like surveys and experiments to gather empirical observations and generalizations. They argued that media influence can be measured, observed, understood, controlled, and utilized for the benefit of the human race. They also argued that if the physical sciences permit people to control the physical world, the social sciences can also permit people to control the social world.
Lazarsfeld and his colleagues, while conducting their full-scale investigation of the effects of political mass communications in Eríe County, Ohio and in Elmira, New York during the 1940 and the 1948 presidential elections, respectively, found out that media were not as powerful as mass society theory assumed and that media influence over public opinion or attitudes was hard to locate. They also found out that people had numerous ways of resisting media influence and were influenced by many competing factors and that media influences were typically less important than social status, group membership, educational attainment, religious or political party affiliations, among others. These findings eventually led to the formulation or construction of the limited effects theory, also known as the indirect effects theory.
A paradigm, also called framework, provides a useful guide in research as long as its basic assumptions are accepted. Though a paradigm exercises great influence over the course of a research, a shift inevitably occur because no paradigm can provide adequate explanations for all observations. Also called theoretical innovation, a paradigm shift occurs when there are efforts to account theoretical limitations and when a new theory is formulated or constructed over and above a dominant theory. It is at this context that the limited effects theory is considered the paradigm shift of the mass society theory.
Formulated from “disciplined” data collections and data interpretations, the limited effects theory was gradually constructed using the inductive approach to theory construction. It assumed that media lacked or have limited power to instantly convert average people from strongly held beliefs, and that it negates, if not totally contradict, the mass society theory assumption that media have the power to reach out and directly influence the minds of the average people.
