Limited Effects Theory

The limited effects theory gained popularity because it provided answers to the questions of troubled elites in the 1930s. When the propaganda theory threatened to challenge freedom and democracy, the limited effects theory argued that most people could not be directly influenced by typical propaganda messages.

However, the limited effects theory actually placed little faith in the rationality of the individual or in his ability to evaluate propaganda messages. During the 1950s and the 1960s, studies found out that most people are politically ignorant or apathetic and that only some people are politically active or involve because their collective wisdom and political knowledge were concentrated in the opinion leaders who are the mainstay of any political system and who play an important role in shaping or reconstructing the voting systems of the electorate.

Factors

1. The refinement and broad acceptance of empirical social research methods was an essential factor in the development of the limited effects theory. This was so, because empirical social research methods were promoted effectively as the only “scientific” way of dealing and measuring social phenomena.
2. People who advocated mass society theories were branded by empirical social researchers as “unscientific.” Mass society theorists were considered as doomsayers, political ideologues, biased against media, or fuzzy-mined humanists.
3. Social researchers exploited the commercial potential of empirical social research method and gained the support of private industries
4. The development of empirical social research method was strongly backed by various private and government foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Science Foundation
5. After empirical social research methods showed that media were not as powerful and threatening as assumed by mass society theories, media companies were encouraged to finance more empirical social researches
6. Empirical social researchers were successful in introducing their approaches within the various social research disciplines - history, sociology, economics, political science, and social psychology - that shaped the development of communication research. Empirical social research was widely accepted as the most scientific way to study communication even though it proved difficult to find conclusive evidence of media influence.

Assumptions

1. Media rarely have any direct influence upon individuals. Most people are sheltered from direct manipulation and that they do not believe everything they read, hear, or watch. This assumption negates, if not totally contradicts the assumption of mass society theory that people are isolated and vulnerable from direction manipulation.
2. There is a two-step flow of media influence. Media could not influence people if the opinion leaders who guide them are not influenced by its messages.
3. By the time most people become adults they have developed strong group commitments like political party or religious affiliations that media messages are powerless to overcome. These commitments make people to reject media messages although other group members are not present to help them.
4. When media effects occur, they are modest and isolated. Large number of people will not change their votes although they are flooded with various media messages everyday.

Limitations

1. Surveys can not measure how people actually use media on a day-to-day basis because they can only record how people report their media experiences
2. Surveys are very expensive and cumbersome way to study people's use of specific media content like their reading of certain news stories or their viewing of specific television programs
3. The research design and data analysis procedures are inherently conservative in assessing the power of media
4. Subsequent research on the two-step flow has produced highly contradictory finding
5. Although surveys can be useful for studying changes over time, they are a relatively crude technique
6. Surveys omit many potentially important variables by focusing only on what can be easily or reliably measured using existing techniques