Page 298 - The Social Animal

280 The Social Animal

when they were kids and how frequently they watched them. The
shows are then rated independently by judges for level of violence,
and the general aggressiveness of the teenagers is rated independ-
ently by their teachers and classmates. Not only is there a high cor-
relation 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. Al-
though these are fairly powerful data, they do not definitively prove
that watching a lot of violence on TV causes children to become vi-
olent teenagers. After all, it is at least conceivable that the aggres-
sive 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. 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 evi-
dence demonstrates that watching violence does indeed increase the
76
frequency of aggressive behavior in children. For example, in an
early experiment on this issue, Robert Liebert and Robert Baron 77
exposed a group of children to an extremely violent TV episode of a
police drama. In a control condition, a similar group of children was
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
78
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. Watch-
ing the violent film had the effect of increasing the number of ag-
gressive 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,