>>NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Parents who teach "tough love" by disciplining their
>>children with spankings could be making them more likely to have sexual problems
>>as teenagers and adults, a leading researcher said.
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
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 influence
