Violence and the media
Correlational evidence
• Belson (1978), surveyed the behavior and viewing
habits of over 1,500 adolescent males in London
in the early 1970’s.
• High exposure to television violence and violent
behavior were moderately correlated.
• The more exposure to television violence, the
greater the reported actual violent activity of the
respondents – holding constant the impact of other
influences on violent behavior such as family
background, cognitive ability, etc.
Longitudinal studies
• Lefkowitz, Huesmann, Eron, and their associates
studied the television viewing habits and behavior
of 875 third-grade children in a semirural county
in upstate New York during the 1960’s. The
researchers reported that children with a
preference for violent programs at age eight were
more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior at age
19 and engage in serious crimes by the time they
were 30 years old.
• In a similar analysis based on surveys conducted
in five countries in the late 1970’s, Huesmann and
Eron (1986) concluded that their findings suggest
a bidirectional relationship between exposure to
media violence and violent behavior: the child
learns to be violent from violent media which, in
turn, induce the desire to watch more violent
media.
• Milavsky and associates (1982), followed
several hundred children in two Midwestern
cities for three years in the 1970's.
• Initial correlations between exposure to
violent media at the beginning of the period
and later aggressiveness turned small and
statistically nonsignificant after controlling
for social and familial factors, as well as
past levels of aggressive behavior.
• Johnson and his colleagues have been following
707 families in upstate New York since 1975.
They used statistics to separate TV viewing from
other factors contributing to aggressive behaviour,
such as family income, education and prior history
of violence.
• The biggest jump in aggressive behaviour occurred
between adolescents who watched less than one hour of
TV per day and those who watched 1-3 hours, all other
things being equal, the researchers found.
• Children who watched three or more hours of TV per day
between the ages of 14 and 16 were roughly five times
more likely to commit violent acts as adults than those who
watched less than one hour.
• Critics question the way that Johnson's team divided
people by their viewing habits invalidates their results.
• Only 88 adolescents averaged less than one hour in front of
the box each day. This group is "so small, it's aberrant",
says Guy Cumberbatch, who heads the Communications
Research Group, a UK company that does broadcasting
and social-policy research. Its members will probably have
many other characteristics not reported in this study, such
as being teachers' offspring or devoutly religious.
• Johnson counters that dividing TV viewers into the groups
that Cumberbatch suggests would not have affected the study's
basic results.
Field experiment
• Robinson: Well I was mostly interested in the aggression
that’s common among these same kids, the 8 to 9 year old
children, which is the hitting and kicking and roughhousing on the playground, or verbal teasing and cursing
other children.
• The research team developed a curriculum that emphasized
turning off the television and engaging in other activities.
They ran a field experiment where the curriculum was
provided to some classes and others did not receive it.
Measures
• Peer rating of aggression—kids rated everyone
else in the class on “how likely individuals were to
say talk back to the teacher, or hit another child
without a reason. [The researchers] asked positive
things as well, like share their toys with each
other, so it wasn’t just all negative.”
• Observation of 60% of the kids on the playground
– “coded each of their acts over one minute randomly selected
periods, multiple one-minute periods, so we actually had a
measure, a direct measure of how aggressive they were, physically
aggressive and verbally aggressive, we listened to them and
watched them.”
• And finally we also surveyed their parents in terms of their
parent judgements of the kids’ aggression.
• What we found . . . was that the kids who were in the
school that received the curriculum actually reduced their
ratings according to their peers . . .by about 25% compared
to the kids in the comparison school. In terms of
playground aggression, the kids in the school that received
the curriculum performed about 40% fewer physically
aggressive acts per minute, and performed about 50%
fewer verbally aggressive acts per minute.
Natural experiments
• A study analyzed effects on children from the
introduction of television in a rural Canadian
community during the 1950’s. The researchers . . .
compared children before and after the
introduction of television in one town (Notel) with
their peers in two comparable towns where
television was already well established: Unitel
(receiving the government-owned channel, CBC)
and Multitel (receiving both CBC and U.S.
stations).
• Aggression was measured by observations of
children’s interactions in the schoolyard during
free play, by teacher ratings, and by peer ratings.
Longitudinal observations of 45 children first
observed in grades one and two and re-evaluated
two years later indicated that both verbal and
physical aggression increased over this two-year
period for children in Notel after the introduction
of television, but not for children in the two
control communities where television was already
available.
• Ledingham et al. (1993) note that Unitel received
only the public television channel (CBC), yet its
children exhibited aggression levels similar to the
Multitel community, which received U.S. channels
(and their greater level of media violence) as well.
• Also, “[T]he amount of television watched at the
initial time of testing by the children of Unitel and
Multitel did not significantly predict the amount of
aggression seen two years later (although
aggression assessed in the follow up period was
predicted by television viewing assessed at the
same time).”
• The link between television and violent behaviour is still
far from clear, believes Helena Hird, spokesperson for the
Independent Television Commission that regulates
commercial television in Britain. "There's plenty of
research that shows quite the contrary," she says.
• For example the Atlantic island of St. Helena only got
television a few years ago. Children there have not become
more aggressive, possibly because they live in close-knit,
carefully supervised communities.
Many sponsored projects and
reviews of literature
• National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of
Violence (1969)
• The Surgeon General’s Scientific Advisory Committee on
Television and Social Behavior (1972)
• The National Institute of Mental Health (“NIMH”)
Television and Behavior Project (1982)
• The Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry Child and
Television Drama Review (1982)
• The American Psychological Association Task Force on
Television and Society (1992)
• All five reviews note the existence of a significant
empirical association between exposure to
television violence and aggressive behavior
among youthful viewers.
• The NIMH study, for example, noted that “the
consensus among most of the research community
is that violence on television does lead to
aggressive behavior by children and teenagers
who watch the programs.” The APA task force
concluded: “There is clear evidence that television
violence can cause aggressive behavior and can
cultivate values favoring the use of aggression to
resolve conflicts.”
• Exposure to mediated violent depictions likely explains a
relatively small amount of the total variation in youthful
violent behavior.
– As Huesmann et al. (1997) point out: “What is important for the
investigation of the role of media violence is that no one should
expect the learning of aggression from exposure to media violence
to explain more than a small percentage of the individual variation
in aggressive behavior.”
• Researchers have become more sensitive to the
impact of variations in depictions of violence and
differences in response among audience members.
– NTVS study of content
– “Peer influence, family role models, social and
economic status, educational level and the availability
of weapons can each significantly alter the likelihood of
a particular reaction to viewing violence on television.”
• According to the American Psychological Association's
1993 report, "Violence and Youth: Psychology's
Response," we know that there are not just one but four
long-term effects of viewing violence:
1. Increased aggressiveness and anti-social behavior
2. Increased fear of being or becoming a victim
3. Increased desensitization to violence and victims of
violence
4. Increased appetite for more and more violence in
entertainment and real life
Other media and violence
• Popular music with violent lyrics may lead to
increased aggression related thoughts and
emotions and this effect is directly related to the
violence in the lyrics, according to a recent study
appearing in the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology. In a set of experiments involving over
500 college students, researchers from Iowa State
University and the Texas Department of Human
Services examined the effects of violent and
nonviolent songs. The students listened to the
songs and their aggressive thoughts and feelings
were then measured.
• Results indicated that after listening to
violent songs students assigned more
aggressive meanings to ambiguous words
(words that such as "rock" and "stick" that
can have either aggressive or nonaggressive
connotations). As well, the research
concluded that listening to violent songs led
to increased feelings of hostility.
Video games
• The greatest concern is directed toward the
violence found in video games
Video game features of concern
• Audience involvement
– First-person shooters
• Reward for simulated violent behavior
– Increasing levels of difficulty as a result of success
(ideal learning conditions)
– Group play/support
– Social support
• Immediate feedback (interactivity)
• Few inhibitors
Video game features
• Good guy violence
• Realism (increasing over time)
• Immersion
– Compelling experience
• Fascist/militarist ideology
• For those same 50 years, the circle of blame
has been fueled by one unanswerable
question: "Does watching violence cause
someone to become violent?" The reason
we've made such poor progress on this issue
for 50 years is because this is the wrong
question to ask about violence in the media.
This question trivializes a complex issue.
• The real question should be: "What is the
long-term impact on our national psyche
when millions of children, in their formative
years, grow up decade after decade
bombarded with very powerful visual and
verbal messages demonstrating violence as
the preferred way to solve problems, and
normalizing fear and violence as 'the way
things are?'"