- An individual perceives a form a behavior described or portrayed by a character in media content
- The individual judges this behavior to be attractive and potentially useful for coping with some personal situatuion
- The reproduced behavior proves useful or effective in coping with the situation thus, rewarding the individual
- With model use, the behavior becomes habitual for that situation
- Copycat effect - you do what you see
They began telling news media how to portray news media about suicide to prevent copy cat
Reality -> News -> Perceived Reality
- People create their vision of reality based upon what they see in TV
- News leads us to believe that crime happening is more than it truly is
