Hypodermic needle model

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The Hypodermic Needle Model, known as the Magic Bullet Theory by critics, is the idea that media penetrate people's minds and instantly create effects.

Most commonly referred to as Magic Bullet Theory, this theory developed from a combination of Freudanism and Behaviorism. The most basic idea behind this theory is the idea that media stimuli operate like magic bullets that penetrate people's minds and instantly create associations between strong emotions and specific concepts.

Magic Bullet Theory assumed what Behaviorism was never able to adequately demonstrate: external stimuli, like those conveyed through mass media, can condition anyone to behave in whatever way a master propagandist wanted. People were viewed as powerless to consciously resist manipulation.

While Lasswell is often associated with the rise of Magic Bullet Theory, it is important to note that Lasswell himself rejected the simplistic theory. He argued that propaganda was more than merely using media to lie to people in order to control them. Lasswell asserted that successful social movements gain power by propagating master symbols over a period of months and years using a variety of media.

Propaganda Theory (aka Magic Bullet) was the first systematic study of mass communication. It focused attention on why media might have powerful effects, identified personal, social, and cultural factors that could enhance the media's power to have effects, and focused attention on the use of campaigns to cultivate symbols.

However, Propaganda theory underestimated the abilities of average people to evaluate messages, ignored personal, social, and cultural factors that limit media effects, and overestimates the speed and range of media effects.

Baran, S. & Davis, D. (2006). Mass communication theory. Thomson Wadsworth, Belmont, CA. pp. 80 - 89.

Further Reading: The Payne Fund Studies Mass Society and the Magic Bullet, by Melvin DeFleur and Sandra Ball-Rokeach The Structure and Function of Communication in Mass Society, H.D. Lasswell

[edit] See also

• Media effects theory

The hypodermic needle model is a model of communications also referred to as the magic bullet perspective. Essentially, this model holds that an intended message is directly received and wholly accepted by the receiver. The model emerged from the Marxist Frankfurt School of intellectuals in the 1930s to explain the rise of Nazism in Germany.

The most famous example of what would be considered the result of the magic bullet or hypodermic needle model was the 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds and the subsequent reaction of its mass American audience.

The phrasing "hypodermic needle" is meant to give a mental image of the direct, strategic, and planned infusion of a message into an individual. This view entails a conceptually fatal flaw in that it tends to ignore matters such as interpretation which are crucial aspects to the communicative process.

A more modern version is the two-step flow of communication theory.

This view of propaganda took root after World War I and was championed by theorists such as Lasswell in his pioneer work Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927). He noted that the people had been duped and degraded by propaganda during the war. Works such as Lasswell's expressed a fear of propaganda. Lasswell based his work on a stimulus-response model rooted in learning theory. Focusing on mass effects, this approach viewed human responses to the media as uniform and immediate. E. D. Martin expressed this approach thusly: "Propaganda offers ready-made opinions for the unthinking herd" (cited in Choukas, 1965, p. 15). Known as the "Magic Bullet" or "Hypodermic Needle Theory" of direct influence effects, it was not as widely accepted by scholars as many books on mass communication indicate. The magic bullet theory was not based on empirical generalizations from research but rather on assumptions of the time about human nature. People were assumed to be "uniformly controlled by their biologically based 'instincts' and that they react more or less uniformly to whatever 'stimuli' came along" (Lowery & DefFleur, 1995, p. 400). As research methodology became more highly developed, it became apparent that the media had selective influences on people.