ABSTRACT
The Mean World Index (MWI) comes from the media cultivation literature that assumes that enculturation is the primary function of TV in society. The MWI considers whether people can be trusted, are fair, and are altruistic. It comes from the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Surveys, which extracted the items from the five-item Faith-in-People Scale. J. M. Wober used one mean-world and one social-perceptions item to construct a security scale and found no differences between heavy and light viewers in Britain. M. Rosenberg reported content validity for his Faith-in-People Scale along with extensive development of its five items. The remaining evidence for criterion-related and concurrent validity is mixed. Gerbner et al. reported a correlation of.12 between overall TV viewing and the MWI, which dropped to.04 after controlling for eight demographic and individual characteristics.
