Children and Television Violence in the United States
ELLEN WARTELLA, ADRIANA OLIVAREZ & NANCY JENNINGS
Americans live in a violent society. Alarming statistics reveal changes in U.S. society as the result of increased violence. According to a report issued by the American Psychological Association (American Psychological Association, 1993), guns are involved in more than 75 percent of adolescent killings. Firearm-related violent crimes have been on the rise in the 1990's. Research indicates a 75.6 percent increase in firearm-related aggravated assault from 1985 to 1994 (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1996). Americans have the highest murder rate of any nation in the world. But the numbers that tell the most tragic story concern children and adolescents:
• Among young people in the age group 15-24 years old, homicide is the second leading cause of death and for African American youth murder is number one.
• Adolescents account for 24 percent of all violent crimes leading to arrest. The rate has increased over time for those in the 12-19 year old age group, while it is down in the 35 and older age group. According to the Federal reports on crime in 1995, juvenile arrests for weapon violations have increased 113 percent nationwide between the years 1985 and 1994.
• Every 5 minutes a child is arrested in America for committing a violent crime and gun related violence take the life of an American child every three hours.
• A child growing up in Washington, DC, or Chicago is 15 times more likely to be murdered than a child in Northern Ireland.
What could account for this? Most of us generally accept the notion that violent behavior is a complex, multivariable problem, formed of many influences. Racism, poverty, drug abuse, child abuse, alcoholism, illiteracy, gangs, guns, mental illness, a decline in family cohesion, a lack of deterrents, the failure of positive role models ... all interact to affect antisocial behavior. As Rowell Huesmann has argued, aggression is a syndrome, an enduring pattern of behavior that can persist through childhood into adulthood.
In simple terms, one given specific act of violence may be less mysterious than some think. We only suggest this theoretically, for of course, we have few doubts that violence is nothing if not insidious and intractable in many ways. But consider the context not of one act of violence, but of the persistent fact of violence. Clearly a number of factors contribute to violence in American society, but to ignore television violence would be a grave oversight. Violence tears across the television screen through many types of programs from music videos and entertainment shows to reality programming and the evening news. By the time the average American child graduates from elementary school, he or she will have seen over 8,000 murders and more than 100,000 other assorted acts of violence (Huston et al., 1992). Even though viewing media violence may not be the sole contributor to violent behavior nor does it have the same effect on all who watch it, more than 40 years of research does indicate a relationship between exposure to media violence and aggressive behavior.
Moreover, the United States is a very heavy television using country: 98 percent of the 95 million American homes have television sets and nearly three quarters have more than one set; two-thirds have cable TV and four-fifths have VCRs. The television set is on more than seven hours per day in the average American home (Broadcasting and Cable Yearbook, 1996).
Most importantly, the television Americans watch -- and increasingly the television programming transported around the world via American and other multinational television conglomerates such as Rupert Murdoch's Sky television -- is very violent programming. Since 1994 we have been involved in the largest-ever study of portrayals of violence on American television, the National Television Violence Study, which came about as a consequence of American public and political concern about the relationship between television violence and real world violence.
In 1993, U.S. Senator Paul Simon became angered by network and cable television inaction after earlier federal legislation exempting the broadcast networks from antitrust regulation to allow them to agree on self-regulation of television violence. Simon strongly suggested that the networks and cablecasters appoint independent groups to monitor violence on television and cable for three years. Failure to do so, Simon said, would lead to Congressional hearings and legislation to reduce television violence. The networks appointed one monitor, and the cablecasters, through the National Cable Television Association, appointed another, the National Television Violence Study (or NTVS). Each was asked to monitor television programming for three years, and each hoped to avoid further regulation. However, the comprehensive 1996 U.S. National Telecommunications Act did bring further regulation, in the form of the V-chip, or blocking device for television sets, and a rating system for all television programming which allows viewers to screen out via the V-chip unwanted, presumably violent, content from appearing on their TV screens.
The National Television Violence Study
The NTVS reports on how violence is portrayed on cable and broadcast television in each of three years, 1996, 1997 and 1998, and it makes recommendations to policymakers, the industry and to parents. Our first report in February 1996 reported on television programming from the 1994-95 television season, and the latest report released in March 1997 reported on programming from the 1995-96 season.
The content analysis of television was of a constructed sample week (collected over more than two dozen weeks from October through June) of programming from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. on 23 channels; these channels included the major broadcast networks, three independent stations, public broadcasting, 12 of the most popular basic cable networks and three premium cable channels -- HBO, Cinemax and Showtime. In all, about 3,200 programs were sampled each year and about 2,700 were content analyzed for their depictions of violence.
We found very little change from year one to year two of our studies. The majority of American television shows have at least one act of violence in them; the context in which most violence is presented is sanitized; violence is rarely punished in the immediate context in which it occurs; and it rarely results in observable harm to the victims. For instance, in both years, we found that perpetrators of violence go unpunished in more than 70 percent of all violent scenes -- although they may be punished by the end of the program. Moreover, the negative consequences of violence -- harm to the victims, their families, as well as the psychological, if not actual physical harm to the perpetrators of violence -- are not often portrayed. For example, nearly half of all violent interactions show no harm to the victims and more than half show no pain. And very infrequently, in less than one-fifth of all violent programming, are the long-term negative repercussions of violence, such as psychological, financial or emotional harm, ever portrayed. Weapons (such as handguns) appear in about one-quarter of all violent programs and very few programs (we estimate 4 percent in each year) have anti-violent themes. On the good side, with the exception of movies on television, television violence is not usually explicit or graphic. And there are differences across television channels (American public television being the least violent and premium cable channels being the most likely to have violent programs), and across programming genres (again movies on cable are most likely to show violence). Overall, however, the NTVS has demonstrated a striking amount of consistency in the presentation of violence on American television over the first two years of the study. American television is indeed a violent medium. (For a more detailed presentation of the National Television Violence Study, see next article.)
Research on the influences of television violence
Over the past forty plus years more than 3,500 research studies of the effects of television violence on viewers have been conducted in the United States, and during the 1990s there have been several extensive reviews of this literature, including the 1991 report of the Centers for Disease Control, which declared television violence a public health hazard; the 1993 study of violence in American life from the National Academy of Science, which implicated media along with other social and psychological contributors to violence; and the American Psychological Association's 1992 study, which also implicated media violence. All three of these reviews supported the conclusion that mass media contribute to aggressive behavior and attitudes as well as lead to desensitization and fear effects, No study claims that viewing media violence is the only, nor even the most important, contributor to violent behavior. Furthermore, it is not every act of violence in the media that raises concern, nor every child or adult who is affected. Yet, there is clear evidence that exposure to media violence contributes in significant ways to real world violence. Each of the three major effects of watching media violence, with specific concerns for child viewers, will be considered: the social learning effect, the desensitization effect and the fear effect.
Social learning
The 1993 report of the American Psychological Association concluded that: "there is absolutely no doubt that those who are heavy viewers of this violence demonstrate increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes and increased aggressive behavior" (American Psychological Association, 1993). This conclusion is based on the examination of hundreds of experimental and longitudinal studies which support this position. Moreover, field studies and cross-national studies indicate that the viewing of television aggression increases subsequent aggression and that such behavior can become part of a lasting behavioral pattern.
Three basic theoretical models have been proposed to describe the process by which such learning and imitation of television violence occurs: social learning theory, priming effects theory and a social developmental model of learning.
Social learning theory, first proposed by Albert Bandura in the 1960s, is perhaps the best known theoretical account of violence effects. Bandura asserts that through observing television models, viewers come to learn behaviors which are appropriate; that is, which behaviors will be rewarded and which will be punished. In this way, viewers seek to attain rewards and therefore want to imitate these media models. When both children and adults are shown an aggressive model who is either rewarded or punished for their aggressive behavior, models who are positively reinforced influence imitation among the viewers. Even research in the field has demonstrated that aggression is learned at a young age and becomes more impervious to change as the child grows older. In a longitudinal study to examine the long-term effects of television violence on aggression and criminal behavior, Huesmann, Eron, Lefkowitz and Walder (1984) studied a group of youth across 22 years, at ages 8, 18 and 30. For boys (and to a lesser, though still significant extent for girls), early television violence viewing correlated with self-reported aggression at age 30 and added significantly to the prediction of serious criminal arrests accumulated by age 30. These researchers find a longitudinal relationship between habitual childhood exposure to television violence and adult crime and suggest that approximately 10 percent of the variability in later criminal behavior can be attributed to television violence.
Priming effects theory serves to augment the more traditional social learning theory account of television violence effects. In the work of Leonard Berkowitz and his colleagues, this theoretical account asserts that many media effects are immediate, transitory and short (Berkowitz, 1984). Berkowitz suggests that when people watch television violence, it activates or "primes" other semantically related thoughts which may influence how the person responds to the violence on TV: viewers who identify with the actors on television may imagine themselves like that character carrying out the aggressive actions of the character on television, and research evidence suggests that exposure to media aggression does indeed "prime" other aggressive thoughts, evaluations and even behaviors such that violence viewers report a greater willingness to use violence in interpersonal situations.
Only Rowell Huesmann's (1986) theoretical formulation of the social developmental model of violence effects offers a true reciprocal theoretical account of how viewers' interest in media violence, attention to such violence and individual viewer characteristics may interact in a theory of media violence effects. Using ideas from social cognition theory he develops an elaborate cognitive mapping or script model. He argues that social behavior is controlled by "programs" for behavior which are established during childhood. These "programs" or "scripts" are stored in memory and are used as guides to social behavior and problem solving. Huesmann and Miller (1994) submit that "a script suggests what events are to happen in the environment, how the person should behave in response to these events, and what the likely outcome to those behaviors would be". Violence from television is "encoded" in the cognitive map of viewers, and subsequent viewing of television violence helps to maintain these aggressive thoughts, ideas and behaviors. Over time such continuing attention to television violence thus can influence people's attitudes toward violence and their maintenance and elaboration of aggressive scripts.
This theory suggests that while viewing violence may not cause aggressive behavior, it certainly has an impact on the formation of cognitive scripts for mapping how to behave in response to a violent event and what the outcome is most likely to be. Television portrayals, then, are among the media and personal sources that provide the text for the script which is maintained and expanded upon by continued exposure to scripts of violence.
Huesmann has demonstrated that there are key factors which are particularly important in maintaining the television viewing-aggression relationship for children: the child's intellectual achievement level, social popularity, identification with television characters, belief in the realism of the TV violence and the amount of fantasizing about aggression. According to Huesmann, a heavy diet of television violence sets into motion a sequence of processes, based on these personal and interpersonal factors, that results in many viewers becoming not only more aggressive but also developing increased interest in seeing more television violence.
Variations by portrayals and viewers
Clearly, not all violent depictions should be treated equally, nor all viewers. The National Television Violence Study has identified several contextual factors within a representation that may influence audience reactions to media violence including: 1) the nature of the perpetrator, 2) the nature of the target, 3) the reason for the violence, 4) the presence of weapons, 5) the extent and graphicness of the violence, 6) the degree of realism of the violence, 7) whether the violence is rewarded or punished, 8) the consequences of violence, and 9) whether humor is involved in violence (Wilson et al., 1996).
In addition, research indicates that certain factors may be processed differently by young viewers. First, young children have more difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy and often imitate superheros with magical powers such as the Power Rangers (Boyatzis, 1995). Secondly, young children may have difficulty connecting scenes and drawing inferences from the plot. Timing of punishments and rewards becomes important in this instance. In many programs, the crime or violent behavior may go unpunished until the end of the program. Young children may have difficulty connecting the ending punishment with the initial violent act and may, therefore, believe that the violence went unpunished (Wilson et al., 1996). Thus, learning of aggressive attitudes and behaviors from television varies by both the nature of the portrayals and the nature of the viewers. The presence of contextual factors in the portrayals which may inhibit young children's social learning of aggression decreases the negative consequences of such portrayals and should be encouraged. Not all violent portrayals are the same and the context of violence is clearly quite important. Similarly, young children, those under the age of seven or eight, may be particularly susceptible to learning from exposure to television violence because of differences in how they make sense of television compared to adults.
Desensitization and fear
Two other effects of television violence viewing have been identified in the research literature: the desensitization and the fear effect. These effects may influence even those viewers who do not themselves behave violently or who have positive attitudes towards using violence.
Research has demonstrated that prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward real world violence and the victims of violence which in turn can lead to callous attitudes toward violence directed at others and a decreased likelihood to take action on behalf of the victim when violence occurs (e.g., Donnerstein, Slaby and Eron, 1994; for further references and discussion, see Wilson et al., 1996). Over time, even those viewers who initially react with horror at media violence may become habituated to it or more psychologically comfortable such that they view any given act of violence as less severe and they may evaluate media violence more favorably. Desensitization can effect all viewers over time.
A third likely effect of viewing television violence has been studied extensively by George Gerbner and his colleagues (Gerbner, Gross, Signiorelli and Morgan, 1986) which demonstrates that heavy viewers of television violence become fearful of the world, afraid of becoming a victim of violence and over time engage in more self-protective behaviors and show more mistrust of others. To the extent that viewers equate the fictional world of television with its overrepresentation of violence as the same as the real world they live in, then such heavy viewers tend to see their world as a fearful and crime-ridden place. It is likely that both fictional and reality programs (including crime-saturated television news) contribute to this fear-inducing effect among viewers.
Television violence in a global context
The substantial research in the United States over the past more than 40 years has been reviewed and found persuasive among the American public and politicians. It was reviews and conclusions such as those presented here which encouraged Senator Simon's and the U.S. Congress's considerable policy initiatives against television violence in the last four years. Children as an audience for such violence have been of considerable concern, and indeed, the V-chip blocking device is thought to be a reasonable remedy for parents to use to protect their children from violent television programming.
Whether the magnitude of the effects of television violence in comparison with other causes of American violence and our violent society is small or large is not at all clear. Many European critics of the American violence literature have pointed out that neither television outside of the U.S. is as violent as our television, nor are the other underlying factors such as poverty and the easy access to guns as prevalent, and therefore this literature is not applicable to other countries and other cultures. To the extent that the global nature of television and film and the dominance of American popular culture is moving across the privatized television environments of Europe and elsewhere, then perhaps American television programming and its effects will foreshadow concerns about television violence effects in other countries. It is clear that where children and television violence is concerned, the question that remains is not whether media violence has an effect, but rather how important that effect is in comparison with other factors in bringing about the current level of crime in the U.S. and other industrialized nations. Future research should also aim to establish who precisely is most susceptible to media violence, and, most importantly, what sorts of intervention might help diminish its influence. In the meantime, any interventions that help establish policies and practices to reduce the socially inappropriate ways of portraying violence and increase the socially responsible ways (such as using violence to assert anti-violence messages) should be encouraged as well. Children and television violence is a public issue that is not going away and which should engage all who are concerned with children's welfare.
_______________
References
American Psychological Association, 1993. Violence and Youth: Psychology's Response. Vol. I: Summary Report of the American Psychological Association Commission on Violence and Youth. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Berkowitz, Leonard, 1984. Some Effects of Thoughts on Anti- and Prosocial Influences of Media Events: A Cognitive Neoassociationistic Analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 95 (3), 410-427.
Boyatzis, Chris, Gina Matillo, Kristen Nesbitt, & Gina Cathey, 1995 (March). Effects of "The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" on children's aggression and pro-social behavior. Presented at the Society for Research in Child Development, Indianapolis, IN.
Broadcasting and Cable Yearbook, 1996. New Providence, NJ: R.R. Bowker.
Center for Communication & Social Policy, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1997. National Television Violence Study 2. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Donnerstein, Ed; Ron Slaby & Leonard Eron, 1994. The Mass Media and Youth Violence. In J. Murray, E. Rubinstein & G. Comstock (Eds.), Violence and Youth: Psychology's Response. Vol. 2, pp. 219-250. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1996. Uniform Crime Reports for the United States, 1995. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Gerbner, G; L. Gross, M. Morgan & N. Signorielli, 1986. Living with Television: The Dynamics of the Cultivation Process. In J. Bryant & D. Zillmann (Eds.), Media Effects, pp. 17-41. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Huesmann, L. Rowell 1986. Psychological Processes Promoting the Relation between Exposure to Media Violence and Aggressive Behavior by the Viewer. Journal of Social Issues, 42 (3), 125 140.
Huesmann, L. Rowell & Laurie Miller, 1994. Long-term Effects of Repeated Exposure to Media Violence in Childhood. Pp. 153-186 in Aggressive Behavior. New York: Plenum.
Huesmann, L. Rowell, L.D. Eron, M.M. Lefkowitz & L.O., Walder, 1984. The Stability of Aggression over Time and Generations. Developmental Psychology, 20 (6), 1120-1134.
Huston, Aletha; Edward Donnerstein, Halford Fairchild, Norma Feshbach, Phyllis Karz, John Murray, Eli Rubinstein, Brian Wilcox & Diana Zuckerman, 1992. Big World, Small Screen: The Role of Television in American Society. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Wartella, Ellen, 1995. Media and Problem Behaviours in Young People. In M. Rutter, & D. Smith, (Eds.), Psychosocial Disorders in Young People: Time Trends &Their Origins. Chichester, England: Wiley (pp. 296-323).
Whitney, Charles; Ellen Wartella, Dominic Lasorsa, Wayne Danielson, Adriana Olivarez, Rafael Lopez, Marlies Klijn, 1996. Parr II: Television Violence in "Reality" Programming: University of Texas, Austin, study. Pp. 269-360 in National Television Violence Study, Volume 1. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Wilson, Barbara; Dale Kunkel, Dan Linz, James Potter, Ed Donnerstein, Stacy Smith, Eva Blumenthal & Timothy Gray, 1996. Parr I: Violence in Television Programming Overall: University of California, Santa Barbara study. Pp. 1-268 in National Television Violence Study, Volume 1. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.