TWO-STEP & MULTI-
STEP FLOW THEORY
Dr Tinam Borah
Asst Professor
DME Media School
TWO STEP FLOW THEORY
• First introduced by Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson,
and Hazel Gaudet in The People’s Choice after research
into voters’ decision-making processes during the 1940
U.S. presidential election.
• They discovered that most voters in the 1940 election got
their information about the candidates from other people
who read about the campaign in the newspapers, not
directly from the media.
• Asserts that information from the media moves in two
distinct stages
• First, individuals (opinion leaders) who pay close attention
to the mass media and its messages receive the information.
• Opinion leaders then pass on their own interpretations in
addition to the actual media content.
• This implies that most people receive information from
opinion leaders through interpersonal communication rather
than directly from mass media.
• Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet concluded that word-of-
mouth transmission of information plays an important role
in the communication process and that mass media have
only a limited influence on most individuals.
• The theory of the two-step flow of communication
reversed the dominant paradigm in mass communication at
the time.
• Before Lazarsfeld’s study, it was assumed that mass media
have a direct influence on a mass audience who consume
and absorb media messages. Media were thought to
significantly influence people’s decisions and behaviours.
• According to their study, factors such as interpersonal
communication with family members, friends, and
members of one’s social and professional circles turned
out to be better predictors of a person’s voting behaviour
than that person’s media exposure.
• These findings came to be known as the “limited effects
paradigm” of media influence
• The theory of the two-step flow of mass communication
was further developed by Lazarsfeld together with Elihu
Katz in the book Personal Influence (1955).
• The book explains that people’s reactions to media
messages are mediated by interpersonal communication
with members of their social environment.
• A person’s membership in different social groups (family,
friends, professional and religious associations, etc.) has
more influence on that person’s decision-making
processes and behaviour than does information from mass
media.
• Researchers of mass communication cannot therefore treat
the public as a homogenous mass audience that actively
processes and responds to media messages uniformly.
• The Multistep Flow of Communication theory is an
improvement over the Two-Step Flow of Communication
Theory.
• It tries to overcome the limitations of the previous theory.
• The multiple-step flow goes through several "channels" of
interpretation before it finally gets to the intended or
targeted user.
• According to it, opinion leaders interfere between the
media’s direct message and the audience’s reaction to it.
• Opinion leaders influence others to change their attitudes
and behaviours more quickly than formal media because
the audience is able to relate to an opinion leader than an
article in newspaper or news program.
The exact number of steps in the
process depends upon the
• Intentions of the source
• Availability of mass media
• The extent of audience exposure to agencies of
communication
• The nature of the message
• The importance of the message to the audience.
