Violence and the media

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 rough-housing 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: • Increased aggressiveness and anti-social behavior • Increased fear of being or becoming a victim • Increased desensitization to violence and victims of violence • 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?'"

Violence and the media