6.20.2011

Watching Reality Shows Makes You Dumb


Well if that ain't a bitch?

A new study shows that people who watch mind numbing reality crap too much are dummies!  Well day-um!  Would've been nice to know that little gem sooner eggheads!

Anyways, the study is the first to show media priming effects of story characters on people's cognitive performance.  So how you react to situations in relation to what (who) you watch...

The experiment seems a little wonky - MSNBC wrote, "...volunteers were told to read a fake screenplay about a character they refer to as a 'foolish soccer hooligan.'  The story describes a day in the life of a man named Meier: He wakes up, reads (and misunderstands) the message in an inspiration-of-the-day calendar, meets his friends in a bar and gets very drunk. Meier then goes to a soccer game, gets into a fight and comes home to crash; he sleeps through the next day. (Substitute the soccer game for a nightclub, and you have something very similar to the televised daily shenanigans of Snooki or The Situation.)"

About 81 volunteers read a boring ass version of the "soccer hooligan" story, while others read a shorter stupider version.  Then the eggheads gave the volunteers multiple choice general knowledge tests which had q's like, "What is the capital of Libya?", "What kind of speed is expressed by the letter 'c' in physics?" and "Who painted La Guernica?"  They reported that "...participants who read a narrative about a stupidly acting soccer hooligan performed worse in the knowledge test than participants who read a narrative about a character with no reference to his intellectual abilities."

Nothing will make me give up my Teen Moms and Housewives... NOTHING!  And PS - even if I didn't watch Rock of Love I still wouldn't know who painted La Guernica!

Image Via www2.css.edu

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