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Mass media: sex and violence
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Mass media: sex and violence
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A 1994 ICM poll found that 80% of people were in favour of censoring violence on television:
A similar number were convinced that children copy such violence and bad language . An ITC poll published in 1993 found that only 1 in 10 viewers were concerned by TV violence (see the figure on the left). Other recent ITC figures suggested that concern about violence is not rising, despite all the fuss in the media (see the figure on the right).
Research into media violence and its possible effects has been conducted for many years. In the fifties and sixties, for example, there was major concern about the possible links between the portrayal of violence and juvenile delinquency and that concern has continued to the present day. Researchers have tended to focus on three possible effects, which are discussed in these sections on violence:
Halloran et al (1970) stress that 'wide generalisations about children in general and violence in general are not likely to be valid' - and that is a conclusion which very many researchers in the empirical tradition have reached.
If you're looking for a firm conclusion from the laboratory and field experiments, Halloran's comments must be disappointing. It is important to bear in mind the wide number of variables that will be involved in any such research - we don't receive media messages in a social vacuum for example; we don't come to media messages without certain values and beliefs about the efficacy, legitimacy, morality of violence; and those values and beliefs may themselves have been shaped partly by the media in the first place. Portrayal of violence in the media is not simply portrayal of violence - it is situated within our understandings of plot, context and genre. All such factors presumably have an effect on our interpretation of the violence we see or read about.
One could also reasonably ask what are violence and aggression? Is the kind of aggression one finds in, say, Dynasty, which consists mainly of people using their wits, their social contacts, their economic power and so on against others counted as a form of aggression? Is the Road Runner dropping a boulder on top of Wile E Coyote counted as violence? Is news footage of an IRA bomb exploding violence? Is it the same kind of violence if that same footage is included in, say, a rock video? Is violence which happens 'off-stage' also violence? Are contact sports such as soccer violence? What about 'verbal violence'? Are all of these examples of the same thing we call 'violence'?
Even if we can agree on a definition of what counts as violence on television or
in film, is it then sufficient simply to count the occurrence of such violent
incidents or do we need also to count the number of pro-social incidents in such
a programme or film? As David Gauntlett comments in his review of the
literature:
The common treatment of television entertainment programmes displays not merely a lack of sympathy for the programmes, but a fundamental lack of understanding. Only such a misunderstanding could lead, for example, to programmes being divided into those with pro-social and those with 'anti-social' content.Gauntlett (1995:13)
The same questions extend beyond the television content and the viewing experience. If we are examining the effects of TV violence, do we assume that violence in the real world is necessarily reprehensible? Clearly, in the case of war or of self-defence some measure of violence is considered legitimate. But how 'legitimate' is the violence of ghetto inhabitants rioting and looting stores owned by corporations which contribute to their exploitation? How 'legitimate' is the non-violence of the owners of those exploitative corporations?
The classic pieces of laboratory research into violence are by Bandura, Berkowitz and Buss. All of them were conducted in the early sixties and were to an extent a reflection of widespread concern in the USA about juvenile delinquency and its possible relationship with film and the relatively new medium of TV. Bandura and Berkowitz both made submissions on their findings to the Senate Sub-Committee set up to investigate juvenile delinquency. Bandura
Bandura was concerned to develop theories of learning beyond the simple stimulus-response theories of behaviourism. As part of his development of observational or social learning theory, Bandura was concerned to demonstrate that children, in addition to learning by response to reward or punishment as the behaviourists had demonstrated, also learnt by imitation, without the presence of reward or punishment.
His investigation into the effects of violence involved the use of a film of a plastic doll which was punched, kicked and generally maltreated. In the presence of the actual plastic doll, the young children who had the film displayed much greater aggression towards it than those who had not seen the film.
Similar effects were observed by Duncker, who showed children a film in which the 'hero' a fieldmouse was shown enjoying some food which he found delicious, but which the children were known to dislike. After the film, 67 per cent of the children had a favourable attitude to this dish, as aginst a mere 13 per cent in a control group. Two days later, this was down to 47 per cent, 36 per cent after four days and by the twelfth day the test group and the control group were the same. Of particular interest was the fact that the children continued to like the food even when they had apparently forgotten the film. (Duncker (1938)) Berkowitz
Berkowitz built upon Bandura's work. One of his best known experiments involved splitting a group of students into groups. One group was 'angered' by being insulted; another was not. One group was shown a film clip of a fight; another group was shown a film of boating. One group was shown a clip of violent and action and given an explanation which justified it; another group was shown the same clip and told it was unjustified.
From the study of these groups, Berkowitz concluded that media representation of aggression as justified was most likely to lead to real aggression.
It should be noted, however, that, when the angered subject had the opportunity to behave aggressively towards all the experimenters, s/he behaved aggressively only towards the one who had angered her. Buss
One of Buss's experiments is similar in design to Milgram's work on obedience to authority. It involved allowing subjects to administer electric shocks to a learner in an experiment to study the effects of punishment on learning. In fact, the experiment delivered no real shocks and had nothing to do with learning. The 'learner' merely acted pain.
Prior to beginning the 'learning experiment' subjects had been shown a film of a violent beating. Those subjects who had seen 'the baddy' being beaten (rather than someone they might sympathise with) exhibited the greatest aggression in administering electric shocks. Eysenck and Nias
Eysenck and Nias concluded from their research that both adult and child groups who are exposed to TV violence consistently display more aggressive behaviour than control groups. They went on to call for greater censorship of TV output and their research findings are warmly welcomed by National VALA. Criticisms
Studies in this vein have all been subjected to criticism.
One criticism is that it is probably not valid to draw conclusions about children's violence towards people from their violence towards a doll. The problem, of course, is that, for ethical reasons, you can't let them knock one another around, so you're stuck with the doll. But what else would you do with a large plastic self-righting doll other than knock it around? After all, even budgerigars do it. Where Bandura's experiment is concerned, it should be noted that, immediately after seeing the film, children were led into the very room which they had just seen in the film. Typically, children are anxious to please adults and, in this case, they had just seen film of an adult showing them how to behave in the room they now found themselves in, an example of what is known as 'experimenter demand'. Gauntlett (1995:18) quotes Noble (1975) as commenting: 'Look, Mummy, there's the doll we have to hit.' In any case, aggression and violence in children may well be innate. They typically are aggressive towards their carer or towards other children, or throw tantrums in public, all ways of testing the carer's boundaries and through which they learn to contain their aggression. The explicit demonstration of violence and aggression by a filmed adult seems under these circumstances bound to lead to aggressive behaviour on the part of the child, the experimenters thereby succeeding in confirming their original hypothesis.
In fact, the children who had not seen the film also knocked the doll around.
Another criticism is that the laboratory environment is not real life. People behave differently in a laboratory environment. Some studies appear to have shown that the kind of behaviour imitated in the laboratory is in fact subject to controls outside the laboratory. One of the reasons that field studies generally show less effect than laboratory studies is almost certainly that the normal constraints and controls as to what is acceptable behaviour are suspended in the artificial laboratory environment. Another is the relative absence of experimenter demand.
In Bandura's experiment the sample sizes have been matched, as have the methods of selection of the experimental group and the control group. In effect, it becomes impossible to draw any firm conclusions because we don't know how representative they were.
Although Bandura's experiment with the doll has been rightly criticized, it
should be said in his defence that he recognized that the relatively simplistic
conclusions drawn from the experiment were not the whole story and that, for
example, people's perception of the legitimacy of violence could differ markedly
depending on their position in society and that:
The critical question for social scientists to answer is not why som epeople who are subjected to aversive conditions aggress, but rather why a sizable majority of them acqiesce to dismal living conditions in the midst of affluent styles of life. To invoke the frustration-aggression hypothesis, as is commonly done, is to disregard the more striking evidence that severe privation generally produces feelings of hopelessness and massive apathy.
(Bandura, 1978 : 19, quoted in Ruddock 2001 : 62)
A criticism of Berkowitz's work is that subjects may well have acted the way they did because they thought that's what the experimenter expected of them - experimenter demand.
An example often cited against those who claim to have found an effect of media violence is Japan. There is considerable violence in the output of Japanese television, film, comics and especially in their 'manga' cartoons, which are quite heavily cut by the BBFC.
Finally, in an experiment by Mueller, Donnerstein and Hallam, subjects were treated either kindly or neutrally and were then shown a violent film, a neutral film or no film. The experiment found no effects at all for aggression, but subjects who had been treated kindly and were then shown a violent film acted more pro-socially than any other subjects. We can hardly conclude from this that exposure to television violence encourages pro-social activity, but we can certainly conclude that it doesn't necessarily (at least within the laboratory) encourage anti-social activity. What we may perhaps conclude is that there is evidence of an 'arousal effect' and that, taking advantage of that effetc virtually any response can be called forth in a laboratory experiment. (see Gauntlett (1995:19-20))
Research into pornography
Regulation of the media in the UK
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