What are the most obvious program genres that would encourage people to assign roles to television sets?
No one has attempted to catalog such roles; consequently, there is no reliable list from which to draw. As a first step, our goal was to choose program content that were familiar to viewers (we chose entertainment and news), and to contrast these specialty roles with a generalist role–that is, an expectation that a particular television set would display anything. This resulted in an experiment where viewers were told either that 1) a particular television set was used to display only entertainment and that another set was used to display only news, or 2) a set was used to display both types of content. The expectation that the specialist television would encourage evaluations of content in favor of its role was based on two characteristics of specialization. First, agents (whether people or televisions) are expected to behave consistently within their specialties, and this should make specialists appear more representative of their roles. In contrast, generalist behavior is diverse.
