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Nobody believes that media by themselves cause aggression. But Leonardo Eron and Rowell Huesmann of the University of Michigan found in a 22-year study following kids from third grade through adulthood that the single best predictor of late aggression better than poverty, grades, a single-parent home or exposure to real violence is a heavy childhood diet of TV carnage. "Of course not every youngster is affected" says Eron. "Not everyone who gets lung cancer smoked cigarettes. And not everyone who smokes cigarettes gets lung cancer. But nobody outside the tobacco industry denies that smoking causes lung cancer."
Much of the most effective research has been done on children because they are considered most susceptible. As Centerwall puts it, "Later variations in exposure, in adolescence and adulthood, do not exert any additional effect." In the early 60's, Albert Bandura at Stanford was the first to show that kids learned behavior from TV, not just from their parents. Psychologists have used four theories of learning to describe how TV violence may influence kids: they learn to imitate what they see on TV, especially when the behavior is rewarded; from the frequency of violence on TV they learn that violence is normal; they become desensitized to real people's suffering; and they become aroused by images on television, triggering violent responses. Early researchers, following Aristotle, thought media violence might be cathartic, purging violent urges, but experiments have not borne this out.
In a classic series of lab experiments in the early 1960's, researchers first frustrated a group of preschool kids, then showed them TV footage of a man hitting a clown doll. Afterward, the kids who saw the violence were more likely to mimic it on a similar doll. Further studies showed that these kids would also spontaneously act out against a man dressed as a clown, indicating that TV violence might spill easily into the real world. In another twist, a group of kids saw a similar footage of a man hitting a doll, but then being spanked for his actions. These children were much less likely to attack the doll themselves.
These last results imply that what matters most is the type or treatment of violence: that screen mayhem that is rewarded will encourage aggression, but that which is punished will inhibit it. By this logic, a heroic John Wayne movie might well be more damaging then a senseless slasher movie, especially if the villain is punished. |
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