Cultivation Theory is basically what happens when we watch too much TV. The theory is that the more people live in the television world, they are going to believe that the social reality on television is going to be the same as the social reality in real life. In other words, its the classic "I saw some one do it on TV therefore it's okay" excuse.
In class we watched an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver that went over America's views on torture. Of course torture is a scary thing on it's own but the thing that scared me the most was on the statistics on the topic of torture methods like waterboarding. In the video it had said that 69% of American's believe that waterboarding was indeed a form of torture, however 49% of people believe that torture is justified and and about 57% of Americans firmly believe that torture is actually useful in obtaining information. But that's not even the scariest part of all of this. Their was an article on torture in The Atlantic dating back to June 19th of 2007 and their is a quote from supreme court justice Antonin Scalia, mentioning torture and why it's justified because of the show 24. He said "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles, he saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Is anyone going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so." Honestly that right there is the most terrifying thing I have ever heard in my life. A supreme court justice is trying to justify torturing human lives just because he saw Kiefer Sutherland do it on TV. The only thing that I can think of that would be even more terrifying is if Donald Trump thought dropping anvils on people was okay because he saw it on Loony Toons.
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