As modern technology progresses, so does our society. Television and video games have grasps which reach far and wide into the world, and the line between these and reality is becoming progressively more blurred. As a student studying sociology A-level, a subject which has challenged me to think about the wider and underlying meanings about how and why we act, I feel drawn to this topic. Sociology is a vast subject, and later in life my aspiration is to put my findings about human nature in to practice through the form of social work. Various email exchanges I have had with the professors of Psychology at Durham and Cambridge have revealed that aggressive behavior patterns in the contemporary youth and the rising amount of readily available sources of violent video games are, indeed, linked. The foremost symptom of violent media I will be examining is to what extent it effects children’s behavior be this in a positive or negative way. Some Psychologists argue that violent media only affects children in the short term considering factors such as heart-rate and brain activity whereas others argue that while the short-term effects are fleeting excessive viewing of violent media has many lasting long-term effects such as an insensitivity to the suffering of others. ‘From a public-health perspective, there is evidence that violent imagery has short-term effects on arousal, thoughts and emotions, increasing the likelihood of aggressive or fearful behavior’ states the Professor of Forensic Psychology and Child Health at the University of Nottingham. In my extended project qualification, I hope to illustrate the true affects that television programmes have on young, developing and impressionable minds. Or perhaps whether there is something greater, more pervasive and darker to blame for the skyrocketing amount of crime and violence we can see in today’s society, only highlighted by the mass number of shootings in the USA and knife crime in the UK’s capital, London. Furthermore, with shocking statistics such as these; ‘the average hour of US television programming contains 40 violent acts per hour and in video games such as ‘call of duty’, players witness on average 360 deaths per hour’. Or the fact that ‘By the age of 18, the average US youth will have seen 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence’, it is imperative that we find out whether it really does negatively affect our societies youth.
Since the very beginning of television and media in 1936, psychologists and scientists have sought to understand just what the impact is on social behavior, principally on children. More importantly the impact of media violence in age old programmes such as ‘Tom and Jerry’ which caricatures brutality or more recently popular video games such as ‘Grand Theft Auto’ which glorifies criminals. Television was initially conceived as a method to sell products under a veil of supposed ‘storytelling’, through product placement and adverts. Today a handful of global conglomerates own and control the telling of all the stories in the world, meaning the leading theme across all television across the globe will inevitably be violence, a subject that is known and recognized internationally destroying all language barriers. This topic particularly draws my interest as a student that has younger siblings who are growing up in a high-tech world where almost everything is accessible from porn to class A drugs. A report in 1982 by the National institute of Mental Health identified various concerning effects of viewing media violence, most notably children may become desensitized to the suffering of others, they may be more fearful of the world around them, a theory called ‘Mean world syndrome’ and finally they can be more likely to act in aggressive ways towards others. The term mean world syndrome was coined by George Gerbner that describes a circumstance whereby due to the excessive viewing of violent media watchers believe that the world is far more dangerous than it actually is. An example of this is mass media publications heavily chronicling terrorist attacks making it appear far more common than it actually is and creating fear, another theory called ‘moral panic’. While this does not directly relate to violence in children, it has a considerable impact. Children and adults alike can become far more offensive as a symptom of fear, implementing more aggressive behavior. I am researching and reporting on the premise that there is conclusive evidence that Children do in fact learn through observing, internalizing and modelling behavior and actions of others, using Albert Bandura’s ‘social learning theory’. The Bobo Doll experiment in 1961 and 1963 sparked many more debates and inspired research in to the effects of observational learning and the multitude of practical implication e.g how children can be influenced through watching violent media. This was the collective name for a number of experiments that studied the behavior of children after watching an adult act aggressively or pro-socially towards a ‘Bobo doll’. The results were unsurprising in that children who observed the aggressive model made far more imitative aggressive responses than those who were in the non-aggressive or control groups, proving Bandura’s hypotheses.
In contrast, other psychologists and researchers have challenged this hypothesis that media violence harms children’s behavior. Researcher Christopher J. Ferguson, has contended this view and claimed that while there is considerable evidence to suggest violent media does impact aggressiveness in children, it fails to control for other extraneous variables such as mental health and family life, which may have affected the results. “Although many factors influence societal violence and small influence of media may be subsumed under larger societal influence, the absence of a correlation would argue that, at very least, other factors are primary compared to media in the production of societal violence.”. Ferguson is essentially suggesting while violent media may be a factor in studying causation for youth’s aggressive behavior there are other potentially many more impactful factors that are not even being considered in current research. This is only bolstered by the email exchange I had with Gabrielle McHarg a PHD student at the University of Cambridge who said “It’s not likely to be a main effect- there will be lots of contextual effects that are likely to strengthen or weaken this association”. I can also refer to another piece of research by Marie-Louise Mares called ‘Positive effects of television on children's social interactions: A meta-analysis’ that claims finding a main effect of media violence to be extremely difficult because there are a lot of other components going on to aggregate or cancel out any violence that may be shown on television. She claims that although aggressive or negative content is shown in children’s television programmes it is often followed by pro-social content such as apologizing or resolving an issue in a positive manner. However, she also notes that it’s hard to know what a child will take from this interaction, whether It will be the pro-social interaction or previous aggressive communication. Furthermore, we can look at a study by
In conclusion, I have found that overall while many Psychologists and researchers believe that media violence can indeed effect the behavior in children and young adults, It is extremely difficult to identify it as the sole factor due to the nature of the research that has been carried out. There are many other extraneous variables that could be at play such as family relations and previous childhood traumas.