Re: Television and Growing Up: The Impact of Televised Viole
Posted: Fri Sep 27, 2013 5:02 am
Chapter 8: Current Knowledge and Questions for Future Research
In this brief closing chapter we shall try to do two things: draw together the evidence from laboratory studies of children's responses to filmed violence (reviewed in Chapter 6) with the evidence from field surveys of television viewing and aggressive behavior (reviewed in Chapter 7), and identify remaining gaps in knowledge which future research should address if we are to know with confidence what television viewing does to affect the development of children.
INDICATIONS FROM THE DATA
The best predictor of later aggressive tendencies in some studies is the existence of earlier aggressive tendencies, whose origins may lie in family and other environmental influences. Patterns of communication within the family and patterns of punishment of young children seem to relate, in ways that are as yet poorly understood, both to television viewing and to aggressive behavior. The possible role of mass media in very early acquisition of aggressive tendencies remains unknown. Future research should concentrate on the impact of media material on very young children.
While the data are by no means wholly consistent or conclusive, there is evidence that a modest relationship does exist between the viewing of violence and aggressive behavior. The correlational evidence from field studies is amenable to either of two interpretations: that the viewing of violence causes the aggressive behavior, or that both the viewing and the aggression are joint products of some other common source. Several findings reviewed in Chapter 7 can be cited to sustain the hypothesis that viewing of violent television has a causal relation to aggressive behavior, though neither individually nor collectively are the findings conclusive. First, we note that, among the correlations of violence viewing with aggressive behavior, two of the strongest ones, on the order of .30, are between earlier viewing patterns and later aggressiveness; both of these findings, however, involve methodological problems and could be explained by operation of a "third variable" related to preexisting conditions.
Second, the experimental studies reviewed in Chapter 6 provide some additional evidence bearing on this issue. Those studies contain indications that, under certain limited conditions, television viewing may lead to an increase in aggressive behavior. The evidence is clearest in highly controlled laboratory studies and considerably weaker in studies conducted under more natural conditions. Although some questions have been raised as to whether the behavior observed in the laboratory studies can be called "aggressive" in the consensual sense of the term, the studies point to two mechanisms by which children might be led from watching television to aggressive behavior: the mechanism of imitation, which is well established as part of the behavioral repertoire of children in general; and the mechanism of incitement, which may apply only to those children who are predisposed to be susceptible to this influence. There is some evidence that incitement may follow nonviolent as well as violent materials, and that this incitement may lead to either prosocial or aggressive behavior, as determined by the opportunities offered in the experiment. However, the fact that some children behave more aggressively in experiments after seeing violent films is well established.
The experimental evidence does not suffer from the ambiguities that characterize the correlational data with regard to third variables, since children in the experiments are assigned in ways that attempt to control such variables. However, the experimental findings are weak in various ways, and not wholly consistent from one study to another. Nevertheless, they provide some suggestive evidence in favor of the interpretation that viewing violence on television is conducive to an increase in aggressive behavior, although it must be emphasized that the causal sequence is very likely applicable only to some children who are predisposed in this direction.
Thus, there is a convergence of the fairly substantial experimental evidence for short-run causation of aggression among some children by viewing violence on the screen and the much less certain evidence from field studies that extensive violence viewing precedes some long-run manifestations of aggressive behavior. This convergence of the two types of evidence constitutes some preliminary indication of a causal relationship, but a good deal of research remains to be done before one can have confidence in these conclusions.
The field studies and the laboratory studies also converge on a number of further points.
First, there is evidence that any sequence by which viewing television violence causes aggressive behavior is most likely applicable only to some children who are predisposed in that direction. While imitative behavior is shown by most children in experiments on that mechanism of behavior, the mechanism of being incited to aggressive behavior by seeing violent films shows up in the behavior only of some children who were found in several experimental studies to be previously high in aggression. Likewise, the correlations found in the field studies between extensive viewing of violent material and acting in aggressive ways seem generally to depend on the behavior of a small proportion of the respondents, who were identified in some studies as previously high in aggression.
Second, there are suggestions in both sets of studies that how children respond to violent film material is affected by the context in which it is presented. Such elements as parental explanations, the favorable or unfavorable outcome of the violence, and whether it is seen as fantasy or reality may make a difference. Generalizations about all violent content are likely to be misleading.
Thus, the two sets of findings converge in three respects: a preliminary and tentative indication of a causal relation between viewing violence on television and aggressive behavior; an indication that any such causal relation operates only on some children (who are predisposed to be aggressive); and an indication that it operates only in some environmental contexts. Such tentative and limited conclusions are not very satisfying. They represent substantially more knowledge than we had two years ago, but they leave many questions unanswered. We turn now to review the questions that still need answering.
FOCUS ON THE FUTURE
The research reviewed here has uniformly been sharply focused on exposure to televised violence on the one hand, and on aggressive tendencies on the other. The narrowness of this focus is not surprising, but exposure to televised violence does not exist in a vacuum. The narrowness of concentration in these studies has severely hampered the interpretation of results. Some of the most important questions that this committee would like to answer are relegated to the realm of future research.
The research to date has whetted rather than satisfied our desire to increase our understanding of the complex psychological and social influences leading to antisocial tendencies. On the basis of the findings we have reviewed in this report, we recommend that future research concentrate in the following areas:
(1) Television in the context of other mass media. It is reasonable to expect that there is a positive relationship between an individual's use of television and his use of other mass media. As indicated earlier, when a stimulus exists in a constellation of highly related stimuli, any member of the constellation can, if studied in isolation, receive credit for the responses evoked by the entire constellation. So far, the attempts to isolate exposure to television have resulted in possible confounding of attribution.
(2) Mass media in the context of the total environment, particularly the home environment. If the analogy is not too far-fetched, we would recall that "high fever" is seldom if ever listed as a cause of death; yet if high fever were studied in the same isolated way that exposure to television has been studied, we might reach some startling conclusions. The importance of developmental history and social environmental context is emphasized in the testimony of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Dean Burch before the Subcommittee on Communications of the Senate Commerce Committee. On September 28, 1971, Chairman Burch posed the question: "To what extent does what the young viewer brings to the TV screen determine what he carries away-which is another way of asking where the television ranks among all the other aspects of a child's environment?"
Indeed, the studies reviewed in Chapter 6 suggest several specific directions for further exploring the relationship between television and aggression. First, identify the predispositional characteristics of those subgroups of children who display an increase in aggressive behavior in response to televised violence. Second, ascertain at what ages different reactions occur. Third, check on the moderating influence of labeling, contextual cues, and other factors under the control of television producers which may reduce the likelihood that predisposed children will react adversely to televised violence. Fourth, further investigate the possibility that content other than violent content may increase the likelihood of subsequent aggressiveness, the possibility that violent content may instigate other behavior besides aggressiveness, and the applicability of such findings to preschool children, youngsters, and adolescents. Finally, we must call attention once again to the gap in longitudinal research on the effects of television programs on children. This gap needs to be filled before we can learn something dependable about the long-term effects of repeated exposure to standard television fare on the personality development of the child.
(3) Functional and dysfunctional aggressive behavior. The lines which separate violence, hostility, aggression, and vigorous competition tend to become blurred in studies of the kind we have reviewed. Certainly, our society does not assign negative value to all these concepts; although traditional sex roles may be breaking down, there are few boys who are not taught to "stand up for your rights and defend yourself." There are those who argue that the realities of life require a certain set or readiness for aggressive behavior. The study of values, mores, and the realities of adaptation in this area would provide an important backdrop for our interest in media effects.
(4) Modeling and imitation of prosocial behavior. In our concentration on potential antisocial effects, we have seriously neglected any balancing effect that may occur. Perhaps this question ought to be more broadly stated as a cost-benefit problem, involving a balance between potential damage and potential benefit. In the current trend toward rejection of alleged overpermissiveness, are we risking a swing of the pendulum all the way to overprotection and overmanipulation? To state this position another way: we want children to climb trees, even though it would be easy to prove that tree climbing causes broken legs.
(5) Teaching and learning of values about violence. We have noted and deplored the paucity of research about the manner in which values with respect to many areas of behavior, including violence, are transmitted, and about the role played by television and other mass media in this communication. In the long run, societal values are shaped by a great variety of environmental forces and institutions; television programs may contribute a great deal or only a small amount to the process. It is conceivable that prolonged exposure of large populations to television violence may have very little immediate effect on the crime rate, but that such exposure may interact with other influences in the society to produce increased casualness about violence which permits citizens to regard with increased indifference actual suffering in their own or other societies, and to reflect that indifference in major political and economic decisions. Research may indicate that such fears are unfounded, but the research needs to be done.
(6) Symbolic functions of violent conflict in fiction. The experience of humanistic scholars suggests that, for adults at least, violent content in fiction is sometimes a vehicle for presenting to a general audience "messages" about important social and cultural issues. The authors and producers need not be fully aware that they are doing this. The Oedipus plays are perhaps the best-known example from the humanities. They have widely been held to be not merely "violence on stage," but also powerful statements in a symbolic medium about pervasive psychological or cultural conflicts. To suppose that plays about the tragic life of King Oedipus were significant to the early Greeks merely because people liked stories about violence would be simplistic. It would likewise be far-fetched to accuse the Greek theater of inciting Greek warriors to repeated assaults on Troy by exposing them to episodes of meaningless violence.
There is a considerable body of literature on the symbolic meanings of primitive (and not-so-primitive) myths and legends, which often are extremely violent. Anthropological literature supports the contention that, whatever else it may do, such folk literature communicates conventional social values and moral standards, and also provides folk interpretations of the pervasive conflicts and problem s of life in a given society at a particular point in its history. It would be desirable to look upon television drama and cartoon programs -- crude as they may be -- as folk literature in this sense. It would be important, in order more fully to understand the role of television in American life, to investigate the latent symbolic "messages" that even violent television plays and cartoons may convey over and above the content of individual scenes.
These are but a few examples of the kinds of research that have been discussed at meetings of the Advisory Committee; for the good reasons described earlier, little attention has been paid thus far to the contextual, developmental. and societal variables. It is our sincere hope that, as pertinent research continues, these more fundamental questions will be attacked.
In this brief closing chapter we shall try to do two things: draw together the evidence from laboratory studies of children's responses to filmed violence (reviewed in Chapter 6) with the evidence from field surveys of television viewing and aggressive behavior (reviewed in Chapter 7), and identify remaining gaps in knowledge which future research should address if we are to know with confidence what television viewing does to affect the development of children.
INDICATIONS FROM THE DATA
The best predictor of later aggressive tendencies in some studies is the existence of earlier aggressive tendencies, whose origins may lie in family and other environmental influences. Patterns of communication within the family and patterns of punishment of young children seem to relate, in ways that are as yet poorly understood, both to television viewing and to aggressive behavior. The possible role of mass media in very early acquisition of aggressive tendencies remains unknown. Future research should concentrate on the impact of media material on very young children.
While the data are by no means wholly consistent or conclusive, there is evidence that a modest relationship does exist between the viewing of violence and aggressive behavior. The correlational evidence from field studies is amenable to either of two interpretations: that the viewing of violence causes the aggressive behavior, or that both the viewing and the aggression are joint products of some other common source. Several findings reviewed in Chapter 7 can be cited to sustain the hypothesis that viewing of violent television has a causal relation to aggressive behavior, though neither individually nor collectively are the findings conclusive. First, we note that, among the correlations of violence viewing with aggressive behavior, two of the strongest ones, on the order of .30, are between earlier viewing patterns and later aggressiveness; both of these findings, however, involve methodological problems and could be explained by operation of a "third variable" related to preexisting conditions.
Second, the experimental studies reviewed in Chapter 6 provide some additional evidence bearing on this issue. Those studies contain indications that, under certain limited conditions, television viewing may lead to an increase in aggressive behavior. The evidence is clearest in highly controlled laboratory studies and considerably weaker in studies conducted under more natural conditions. Although some questions have been raised as to whether the behavior observed in the laboratory studies can be called "aggressive" in the consensual sense of the term, the studies point to two mechanisms by which children might be led from watching television to aggressive behavior: the mechanism of imitation, which is well established as part of the behavioral repertoire of children in general; and the mechanism of incitement, which may apply only to those children who are predisposed to be susceptible to this influence. There is some evidence that incitement may follow nonviolent as well as violent materials, and that this incitement may lead to either prosocial or aggressive behavior, as determined by the opportunities offered in the experiment. However, the fact that some children behave more aggressively in experiments after seeing violent films is well established.
The experimental evidence does not suffer from the ambiguities that characterize the correlational data with regard to third variables, since children in the experiments are assigned in ways that attempt to control such variables. However, the experimental findings are weak in various ways, and not wholly consistent from one study to another. Nevertheless, they provide some suggestive evidence in favor of the interpretation that viewing violence on television is conducive to an increase in aggressive behavior, although it must be emphasized that the causal sequence is very likely applicable only to some children who are predisposed in this direction.
Thus, there is a convergence of the fairly substantial experimental evidence for short-run causation of aggression among some children by viewing violence on the screen and the much less certain evidence from field studies that extensive violence viewing precedes some long-run manifestations of aggressive behavior. This convergence of the two types of evidence constitutes some preliminary indication of a causal relationship, but a good deal of research remains to be done before one can have confidence in these conclusions.
The field studies and the laboratory studies also converge on a number of further points.
First, there is evidence that any sequence by which viewing television violence causes aggressive behavior is most likely applicable only to some children who are predisposed in that direction. While imitative behavior is shown by most children in experiments on that mechanism of behavior, the mechanism of being incited to aggressive behavior by seeing violent films shows up in the behavior only of some children who were found in several experimental studies to be previously high in aggression. Likewise, the correlations found in the field studies between extensive viewing of violent material and acting in aggressive ways seem generally to depend on the behavior of a small proportion of the respondents, who were identified in some studies as previously high in aggression.
Second, there are suggestions in both sets of studies that how children respond to violent film material is affected by the context in which it is presented. Such elements as parental explanations, the favorable or unfavorable outcome of the violence, and whether it is seen as fantasy or reality may make a difference. Generalizations about all violent content are likely to be misleading.
Thus, the two sets of findings converge in three respects: a preliminary and tentative indication of a causal relation between viewing violence on television and aggressive behavior; an indication that any such causal relation operates only on some children (who are predisposed to be aggressive); and an indication that it operates only in some environmental contexts. Such tentative and limited conclusions are not very satisfying. They represent substantially more knowledge than we had two years ago, but they leave many questions unanswered. We turn now to review the questions that still need answering.
FOCUS ON THE FUTURE
The research reviewed here has uniformly been sharply focused on exposure to televised violence on the one hand, and on aggressive tendencies on the other. The narrowness of this focus is not surprising, but exposure to televised violence does not exist in a vacuum. The narrowness of concentration in these studies has severely hampered the interpretation of results. Some of the most important questions that this committee would like to answer are relegated to the realm of future research.
The research to date has whetted rather than satisfied our desire to increase our understanding of the complex psychological and social influences leading to antisocial tendencies. On the basis of the findings we have reviewed in this report, we recommend that future research concentrate in the following areas:
(1) Television in the context of other mass media. It is reasonable to expect that there is a positive relationship between an individual's use of television and his use of other mass media. As indicated earlier, when a stimulus exists in a constellation of highly related stimuli, any member of the constellation can, if studied in isolation, receive credit for the responses evoked by the entire constellation. So far, the attempts to isolate exposure to television have resulted in possible confounding of attribution.
(2) Mass media in the context of the total environment, particularly the home environment. If the analogy is not too far-fetched, we would recall that "high fever" is seldom if ever listed as a cause of death; yet if high fever were studied in the same isolated way that exposure to television has been studied, we might reach some startling conclusions. The importance of developmental history and social environmental context is emphasized in the testimony of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Dean Burch before the Subcommittee on Communications of the Senate Commerce Committee. On September 28, 1971, Chairman Burch posed the question: "To what extent does what the young viewer brings to the TV screen determine what he carries away-which is another way of asking where the television ranks among all the other aspects of a child's environment?"
Indeed, the studies reviewed in Chapter 6 suggest several specific directions for further exploring the relationship between television and aggression. First, identify the predispositional characteristics of those subgroups of children who display an increase in aggressive behavior in response to televised violence. Second, ascertain at what ages different reactions occur. Third, check on the moderating influence of labeling, contextual cues, and other factors under the control of television producers which may reduce the likelihood that predisposed children will react adversely to televised violence. Fourth, further investigate the possibility that content other than violent content may increase the likelihood of subsequent aggressiveness, the possibility that violent content may instigate other behavior besides aggressiveness, and the applicability of such findings to preschool children, youngsters, and adolescents. Finally, we must call attention once again to the gap in longitudinal research on the effects of television programs on children. This gap needs to be filled before we can learn something dependable about the long-term effects of repeated exposure to standard television fare on the personality development of the child.
(3) Functional and dysfunctional aggressive behavior. The lines which separate violence, hostility, aggression, and vigorous competition tend to become blurred in studies of the kind we have reviewed. Certainly, our society does not assign negative value to all these concepts; although traditional sex roles may be breaking down, there are few boys who are not taught to "stand up for your rights and defend yourself." There are those who argue that the realities of life require a certain set or readiness for aggressive behavior. The study of values, mores, and the realities of adaptation in this area would provide an important backdrop for our interest in media effects.
(4) Modeling and imitation of prosocial behavior. In our concentration on potential antisocial effects, we have seriously neglected any balancing effect that may occur. Perhaps this question ought to be more broadly stated as a cost-benefit problem, involving a balance between potential damage and potential benefit. In the current trend toward rejection of alleged overpermissiveness, are we risking a swing of the pendulum all the way to overprotection and overmanipulation? To state this position another way: we want children to climb trees, even though it would be easy to prove that tree climbing causes broken legs.
(5) Teaching and learning of values about violence. We have noted and deplored the paucity of research about the manner in which values with respect to many areas of behavior, including violence, are transmitted, and about the role played by television and other mass media in this communication. In the long run, societal values are shaped by a great variety of environmental forces and institutions; television programs may contribute a great deal or only a small amount to the process. It is conceivable that prolonged exposure of large populations to television violence may have very little immediate effect on the crime rate, but that such exposure may interact with other influences in the society to produce increased casualness about violence which permits citizens to regard with increased indifference actual suffering in their own or other societies, and to reflect that indifference in major political and economic decisions. Research may indicate that such fears are unfounded, but the research needs to be done.
(6) Symbolic functions of violent conflict in fiction. The experience of humanistic scholars suggests that, for adults at least, violent content in fiction is sometimes a vehicle for presenting to a general audience "messages" about important social and cultural issues. The authors and producers need not be fully aware that they are doing this. The Oedipus plays are perhaps the best-known example from the humanities. They have widely been held to be not merely "violence on stage," but also powerful statements in a symbolic medium about pervasive psychological or cultural conflicts. To suppose that plays about the tragic life of King Oedipus were significant to the early Greeks merely because people liked stories about violence would be simplistic. It would likewise be far-fetched to accuse the Greek theater of inciting Greek warriors to repeated assaults on Troy by exposing them to episodes of meaningless violence.
There is a considerable body of literature on the symbolic meanings of primitive (and not-so-primitive) myths and legends, which often are extremely violent. Anthropological literature supports the contention that, whatever else it may do, such folk literature communicates conventional social values and moral standards, and also provides folk interpretations of the pervasive conflicts and problem s of life in a given society at a particular point in its history. It would be desirable to look upon television drama and cartoon programs -- crude as they may be -- as folk literature in this sense. It would be important, in order more fully to understand the role of television in American life, to investigate the latent symbolic "messages" that even violent television plays and cartoons may convey over and above the content of individual scenes.
These are but a few examples of the kinds of research that have been discussed at meetings of the Advisory Committee; for the good reasons described earlier, little attention has been paid thus far to the contextual, developmental. and societal variables. It is our sincere hope that, as pertinent research continues, these more fundamental questions will be attacked.