Violence and the Media

        In Manteca, California, two young boys murdered a disabled man by violently kicking, stabbing, beating, and finally choking him. When being questioned by the police as to why the boys poured salt in the dying mans wounds, one of the boys responded, “Oh I don’t know. I just seen it on TV” (Levine 71). In today’s society, these situations are becoming extremely common. Violence on television is overwhelming, and the negative affect it has on viewers is frightening. The overall pattern of research findings indicates a positive relationship between television violence and aggressive behavior. An article from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry states that “the majority of evidence from more than 3,000 research studies over two decades shows that the violence portrayed on television influences the attitudes and behavior of children who watch it” (“Children and TV Violence”). It has become evident that violence glamorized on television causes viewers to learn aggressive behavior.

        According to Leonard Eron, an expert authority on media, “There can no longer be any doubt that heavy exposure to televised violence is one of the causes of aggressive behavior, crime, and violence in society” (Levine 4). There are a variety of reasons one might expect viewers to learn aggressive behavior from the media. The abundance of violent acts on television may increase the tendency of viewers to model their behavior after ideas in the media that they otherwise might not have considered. This may cause viewers to become desensitized by the amount of violence viewed on television. Because of this, people may develop a false assumption of the world based on the frequency of violence on television and various other media outlets.  

        There are many theories and studies on how people model their behavior after violence viewed on television. Famous psychologist Albert Bandura proposed one of the most influential theories of media-related aggression. Bandura’s social learning theory highlights the tendency of viewers to imitate violent acts on television. According to the social learning theory, people acquire aggressive attitudes by observing others (Bushman 291). Bandura has argued that television can shape the forms that aggressive behavior takes. Television can direct people’s behavior and actions to areas they may not have considered. People who are already motivated to engage in aggression may model their actions after what they view on television (“Cultivation Theory”).  

        In Bandura’s most famous experiment, the Bobo-doll experiment, a large inflatable clown that bounces back up after being hit, Bandura and his coworkers tested the effects of observing violence on the aggression levels of children. In this experiment, Bandura divided nursery-age children in three separate groups. The first group was the control group, where the children were placed in a room full of toys including a Bobo-doll, and allowed to play with any of the items in the room. The second group watched a video of an adult beating up a Bobo doll. After viewing the video, these children were also released into the room full of toys where they were allowed to play. The final experimental group saw a live beating of the Bobo doll, identical to the scene on the video. Afterwards, they too were released into the room full of toys and allowed to play. The children in the control group displayed very few aggressive behaviors while playing in the toy room. However, children who had viewed attacks on the Bobo doll prior to playing, displayed a considerable number of aggressive behaviors similar to those they had viewed. The interesting fact about the experiment was that the children “modeled” their behavior after the actions they had viewed, instead of simply imitating the adults (“Observational Learning”). This suggests that the scene they viewed gave them the idea to act but didn’t dictate their exact actions. According to Madeline Levine, Ph.D., a specialist in the field of media violence, “Children frequently ‘model’ their behavior rather than simply imitating what they see” (Levine 20).          

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        In following the idea that television and various other media outlets are a guide for behavior, psychologist Carl Jung is famous for conducting word association studies to examine the “unconscious mind” (Bushman 293). In Jung’s experiment, participants made mental connections to homonyms after viewing either a nonviolent or a violent video. These homonyms were carefully selected to have one meaning more aggressive than the other, such as “pound” and “sock.” The videotapes were selected to be equally entertaining but very different in their content of violence. The violent tape chosen was Karate Kid III and the nonviolent tape was Gorillas in ...

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