1. The Problem
2. The Inoculation Effect:
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1. The Problem
Several years ago, Albert Bandura and his colleagues conducted a
series of classic experiments. The basic procedure in these studies
was to have an adult knock around a plastic, air-filled "Bobo" doll
(the kind that bounces back after it has been knocked down). Sometimes
the adult accompanied her physical aggression with verbal abuse
against the doll. Children who watched the adult were then allowed to
play with the doll. In these experiments, not only did the children
imitate the aggressive models, they also engaged in other forms of
aggressive behavior after having witnessed the aggressive behavior of
the adult. In short, the children did more than copy the behavior of
an adult; seeing a person behave aggressively served as an impetus for
them to engage in innovative aggressive behavior. We call this process
social learning. Why are these experiments considered so important?
Who cares what happens to a Bobo doll, anyway? Stay tuned.
One particularly powerful set of agents of social learning are the
mass media - especially television. There is no doubt that television
plays a major role in the socialization of children. There is also no
doubt that TV remains steeped in violence. According to a recent
study, 58 percent of all TV programs contain violence - and, of those,
78 percent are without remorse, criticism, or penalty for that
violence. Indeed, some 40 percent of the violent incidents seen on TV
were initiated by characters portrayed as heroes or other attractive
role models for children.
Exactly what do children learn from watching violence on TV? A number
of long-term studies indicate that the more violence individuals watch
on TV as children, the more violence they exhibit years later as
teenagers and young adults. In a typical study of this kind, (1)
teenagers are asked to recall which shows they watched on TV when they
were kids and how frequently they watched them. (2) The shows are
rated independently by judges for level of violence. (3) The general
aggressiveness of the teenagers is rated independently by their
teachers and classmates. Not only is there a high correlation between
the amount of violent TV watched and the viewer's subsequent
aggressiveness, but the impact also accumulates over time; that is,
the strength of the correlation increases with age. While these are
fairly powerful data, they do not definitively prove that watching a
lot of violence on TV causes children to become violent teenagers.
After all, it is at least conceivable that the aggressive kids were
born with a tendency to enjoy violence and that this enjoyment
manifests itself in both their aggressive behavior and their liking to
watch violence on TV. Once again, we see the value of the controlled
experiment in helping us to understand what causes what. In order to
demonstrate conclusively that watching violence on TV actually causes
violent behavior, the relationship must be shown experimentally.
Because this is an issue of great importance to society, it has been
well researched. The overwhelming thrust of the experimental evidence
demonstrates that watching violence does indeed increase the frequency
of aggressive behavior in children. For example, in an early
experiment on this issue, Robert Liebert and Robert Baron exposed a
group of children to an extremely violent TV episode of a police
drama. In a control condition, a similar group of children were
exposed to an exciting but nonviolent TV sporting event for the same
length of time. Each child was then allowed to play in another room
with a group of other children. Those who had watched the violent
police drama showed far more aggression against their playmates than
those who had watched the sporting event.
A subsequent experiment by Wendy Josephson showed, as one might
expect, that watching TV violence has the greatest impact on
youngsters who are somewhat prone to violence to begin with. In this
experiment, youngsters were exposed to either a film depicting a great
deal of police violence or an exciting nonviolent film about bike
racing. The youngsters then played a game of floor hockey. Watching
the violent film had the effect of increasing the number of aggressive
acts committed during the hockey game- primarily by those youngsters
who had previously been rated as highly aggressive by their teachers.
These kids hit others with their sticks, threw elbows, and yelled
aggressively at their opponents to a much greater extent than either
the kids rated as nonaggressive who had also watched the violent film
or those rated as aggressive who had watched the nonviolent film.
Thus, it may be that watching media violence gives aggressive kids
permission to express their aggression. Josephson's experiment
suggests that youngsters who do not have aggressive tendencies to
begin with do not necessarily act aggressively-at least, not on the
basis of seeing only one violent film.
That last phrase is an important one because it may be that even
youngsters who are not prone toward aggression will become more
aggressive if exposed to a steady diet of violent films over a long
period. That is exactly what was found in a set of field experiments
performed by Ross Parke and his colleagues. In these experiments,
different groups of children were exposed to differing amounts of
media violence over an extended period of time. In these experiments,
the great majority of the kids (even those without strong aggressive
tendencies) who were exposed to a high degree of media violence over a
long period were more aggressive than those who watched more benign
shows.
We might mention, in passing, that at a recent congressional hearing
on TV violence, it was estimated that the average 12-year-old has
witnessed more than 100,000 acts of violence on television. We mention
this because we believe that one of the crucial factors involved in
the above findings (in addition to social learning and imitation) is
the simple phenomenon of priming. That is, just as exposing children
to rifles and other weapons left lying around the house or the
laboratory tends to increase the probability of an aggressive response
when children subsequently experience pain or frustration, so too
might exposing them to an endless supply of violence in films and on
TV.
Thus far, in discussing the effects of media violence, we have focused
much of our attention on children - and for good reason. Youngsters
are, by definition, much more malleable than adults; that is, it is
generally assumed that their attitudes and behaviors can be more
deeply influenced by the things they view. But the effect of media
violence on violent behavior may not be limited to children. On
numerous occasions, adult violence seems to be a case of life
imitating art. For example, a few years ago, a man drove his truck
through the window of a crowded cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, and began
shooting people at random. By the time the police arrived, he had
killed 22 people, making this the most destructive shooting spree in
American history. He then turned the gun on himself. In his pocket,
police found a ticket stub to Fisher King, a film depicting a deranged
man firing a shotgun into a crowded bar, killing several people.
Did seeing the film cause the violent act? We cannot be sure. But we
do know that violence in the media can and does have a profound impact
on the behavior of adults. Several years ago, David Phillips
scrutinized the daily homicide rates in the United States and found
that they almost always increased during the week following a
heavyweight boxing match. Moreover, the more publicity surrounding the
fight, the greater the subsequent increase in homicides. Still more
striking, the race of prizefight losers was related to the race of
murder victims after the fights: After white boxers lost fights, there
was a corresponding increase in the murder of white men but not of
black men; after black boxers lost fights, there was a corresponding
increase in the murder of black men but not of white men. Phillips's
results are convincing; they are far too consistent to be dismissed as
merely a fluke. Again, this should not be construed as indicating that
all people or even a sizable percentage of people are motivated to
commit violence after watching media violence. But the fact that some
people are influenced-and that the results can be tragic-cannot be
denied.
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
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2. The Inoculation Effect:
...if people receive prior exposure to a brief communication that they
are then able to refute, they tend to be "immunized" against a
subsequent full-blown presentation of the same argument, in much the
same way that a small amount of an attenuated virus immunizes people
against a full-blown attack by that virus. In an experiment by William
McGuire and Dimitri Papa-georgis, a group of people stated their
opinions; these opinions were then subjected to a mild attack-and the
attack was refuted. These people were subsequently subjected to a
powerful argument against their initial opinions. Members of this
group showed a much smaller tendency to change their opinions than did
the members of a control group whose opinions had not been previously
subjected to the mild attack. In effect, they had been inoculated
against opinion change and made relatively immune. Thus, not only is
it often more effective as a propaganda technique to use a two-sided
refutational presentation, but if it is used skillfully, such a
presentation tends to increase the audience's resistance to subsequent
counterpropaganda.
In an interesting field experiment, Alfred McAlister and his
colleagues inoculated seventh-grade students against existing peer
pressure to smoke cigarettes. For example, the students were shown
advertisements (popular at the time) implying that truly liberated
women are smokers-"You've come a long way, baby!" They were then
inoculated by being taught that a woman couldn't possibly be liberated
if she were hooked on nicotine. Similarly, because many teenagers
begin smoking, in part, because it seems "cool" or "tough" (like the
Marlboro man), peer pressure took the form of being called "chicken"
if one didn't smoke. Accordingly, McAlister set up a situation to
counteract that process; the seventh graders role-played a situation
in which they practiced countering that argument by saying something
like "I'd be a real chicken if I smoked just to impress you." This
inoculation against peer pressure proved to be very effective. By the
time the students were in the ninth grade, they were half as likely to
smoke as those in a control group from a similar junior high school.
Research has found that, in producing resistance, inoculation is most
effective when the belief under attack is a cultural truism. A
cultural truism is a belief accepted as unquestionably true by most
members of a society, like "The United States is the most wonderful
country in the world" or "If people are willing to work hard, they can
succeed." Cultural truisms are rarely called into question;
consequently, it is relatively easy for us to lose sight of why we
hold those beliefs. Thus, if subjected to a severe attack, these
beliefs may crumble. To motivate us to bolster our beliefs, we must be
made aware of their vulnerability, and the best way to do this is to
be forced to a mild attack on those beliefs. Prior exposure, in the
form of a watered-down attack on our beliefs, produces resistance to
later persuasion because (1) we become motivated to defend our beliefs
and (2) we gain some practice in defending these beliefs by being
forced to examine why we hold them. We are then better equipped to
resist a more serious attack.
This is an important point that was frequently ignored or
misunderstood by policymakers during the height of the Cold War. For
example, in the aftermath of the Korean War, when there was a great
deal of fear about the possibility that our prisoners of war had been
systematically "brainwashed" by the Chinese Communists, a Senate
committee recommended that, in order to build resistance among our
young people to brainwashing and other forms of Communist propaganda,
courses on "patriotism and Americanism" should be instituted in our
public school system. But my reading of the research on inoculation
led me to an entirely different conclusion. Specifically, I asserted
that the best way to help people resist antidemocratic propaganda
would be to challenge their belief in democracy, and the best way to
build resistance to one-sided Communist propaganda would be to teach
fair, even-handed courses on Communism in high schools. At the height
of the Cold War, such a suggestion was undoubtedly considered
subversive by those politicians who were terrified at the prospect of
our young people learning anything positive about Communism. The fear
was that this would make them more vulnerable to propaganda. But
historical events have supported the social psychological research,
showing that, if one wants to mitigate against simplistic propaganda,
there is no substitute for free inquiry into ideas of all kinds. The
person who is easiest to brainwash is the person whose beliefs are
based on slogans that have never been seriously challenged.
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
A group of puppies is divided into two groups one group lives in the
germ ridden world the other group live in a germ free environment.
Group one resists germs and group two will catch every bug & germ when
exposed.
