Industry-funded media research is designed so its results will vindicate the sponsor.

Evidence

The television industry tried its hand with research of its own by sponsoring several field studies. The findings of one such study by Feshbach and Singer (1971) were of questionable reliability because of major methodological flaws (Bandura, 1973). Replication of the research without the methodological defects yielded findings that were not to the industry’s liking (Wells, 1971). The study was never published. With financial sponsorship and co-production by CBS, Milgram and Shotland (1973) conducted studies showing that exposure to modeled thievery does not lead viewers to steal money from a charity box called Project Hope, a medical charity that treats poor children worldwide. The charity box, with a dollar bill hanging from it, was mounted on a poster showing a physician treating a little girl and a picture of the hospital ship with the words “Where there is Hope there is life.” This experimental setup was analogous to demonstrating that televised modeling of theft has no adverse effects by showing that viewers will not rip off a tiny charitable contribution to Mother Teresa. As the saying goes, there is honor even among thieves concerning a charitable humanitarian cause. The studies were published as a book and distributed free of charge by the network. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 904

Categorization

• SEED: An article angle on how funding shapes the very questions and test setups of ‘neutral’ social science, beyond cherry-picking results.
• XREF: Connects to the vault’s claims about how power structures rationalize harmful policy (Cooper’s social-conservatism, authoritarianism claims) — same pattern of stacked legitimacy.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 904