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The authors investigate brand advertising as an instrument of class politics, used to shape perceptions of and beliefs about social groups, specifically the working class. These images are consistent with the prescriptions of capitalist realism. The authors content-analyze representations of the working class drawn from a random sample of ads from 1950 to 2010. Quantitative results are compared to a variety of secondary data sources, including the General Social Survey and public opinion polling. The authors find that representations of the working class do not closely follow social, political, or economic changes. If anything, increasingly nostalgic images contradict the disappearance of blue-collar jobs. The authors examine the ads in more depth to explain why the content does not align with objective reality, identifying a variety of tableaus commonly used in representations of the working class that are consistent with capitalist realism and myths of the American class structure.

This study conceptualizes the cultivation effect in terms of the accessibility of information in memory. Contemporary social cognition research indicates that individuals consistenly use the most accessible information in memory as a basis for a variety of judgments. Consistent with this body of literature, the current study demonstrates that, based on a reaction time task, those subjects who watch comparatively more television not only overestimate frequency or probability but also give faster responses to various types of cultivation questions. These results support the notion that relevant information, presumably "cultivated" from television viewing, is more accessible in memory for heavier viewers, and, consistent with predictions made by the availability heuristic literature, overestimations of frequency or probability are associated with this enhanced accessibility. Moreover, when controlling for speed of response in the correlation between television viewing and social reality estimates, the relationship is diminished or disappears entirely, suggesting that enhanced accessibility of relevant information for heavier viewers can at least partially account for the cultivation effect.