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An overview is presented of the social psychological research on the effects of media messages. Focus centers on the ways in which people receive & utilize information about the surrounding social universe. Most of the research described here involved the unobtrusive presentation of either confirming (good) or disconfirming (bad) news to people. Specific hypotheses concern the ways in which good & bad news have an impact upon people's willingness to help strangers, their descriptions of human nature, & their perceptions of others & of themselves. As recipients of information about the intentional actions of others, people's views of the social universe & their probabilistic estimates about human nature are constantly being influenced. These informational influences seem to alter behavioral choices & psychological perspectives, & lend these findings their particular significance for journalists & for others interested in the effects of media messages. Specifically, findings reveal that: (1) Information on PO is applied to specific others about whom nothing else is known. (2) News stories that are explicitly prosocial or antisocial elicit very different patterns of response. Antisocial news stories appear to alter one's sense of the surrounding social community & also to mobilize a sense of threat in people, leading to heightened discriminations between similar & dissimilar others, less leniency in judging guilt or innocence, & the increased occurrence of competitive behavior. (3) Good & bad news not based on human intention do not affect the likelihood of cooperative or competitive behavior. Nonintentional bad events (or good ones) do not change social perceptions & so do not alter the psychological states being measured. (4) Self-perceptions show signs of being cognitively more rigid in structure & more defensive in stance following the presentation of antisocial news. 6 Tables. AA.