A Formal Summary of The Knowledge Gap Hypothesis
Given the preceding information, the knowledge gap hypothesis can be expressed using the following set of related propositions:
- People in a society exhibit great psychological diversity due to their psychological makeup, learned experiences, social relationships, and social category memberships.
- Despite these differences, people with more education tend to have better developed cognitive and communication skills, broader social spheres with more and more diverse social contacts, and a greater amount of stored information than their counterparts with less education.
- People with greater education also tend express interest in, and expose themselves to, a broader range of topics, including serious topics like public affairs, science, and health news.
- Therefore, as the infusion of mass media information into a social system increases, segments of the population with higher socioeconomic status tend to acquire this information at a faster rate than the lower status segments so that the gap in knowledge between these segments tends to increase rather than decrease.
Read more about this topic: Knowledge Gap Hypothesis
Famous quotes containing the words formal, summary, knowledge, gap and/or hypothesis:
“On every formal visit a child ought to be of the party, by way of provision for discourse.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“A young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end that is aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)