Interpersonal Diffusion

Studies that followed the “Martian Invasion” broadcast began to focus on the fact that members of the audience also engaged in face-to-face communications with family, friends and coworkers.

Theorists hypothesized that certain members of the audience, called “opinion leaders”, would be more influential than other members. In theory the opinion leaders would make up their minds as to what the media messages meant and then tell their friends and neighbors.

Research studies conducted to test this hypothesis did find that certain members of the audience were opinion leaders. However, different members were the opinion leaders on different subjects. Because of this, it was (and continues to be) very difficult to find a simple explanation for the spread, or diffusion, of the content of media messages through a society.

Another finding that contributed to the difficulty of explaining diffusion came from the study of rumors. Researchers found that the accuracy of a statement spread by word-of-mouth decreases very rapidly as it travels through a population. Thus, it is hard to see how messages sent to opinion leaders via the mass media could be passed on with any accuracy.

These studies resulted in the conclusion that face-to-face communication is much more important to the process whereby people form and change their opinions than the content of mass media messages.