Remote Controlled: Part Four

Children and T.V.:<BR> Glamourizing Violence

By Leonard Jason

Television has an amazing knack for glamorizing violence. It's violence with a wisecrack. It's violence with Don Henley music in the background. It's violence with spectacular special effects. It's also often violence without consequence. Despite a steady stream of gunshots, grenades, kidnappings and beatings, few viewers see grieving families, hospital bills, prison time, lasting physical pain or psychological damage. Such omissions heartily feed the myth of youthful invincibility.

Violence Research:

Public interest in the issue of televised violence has been paralleled by, if not exceeded by, scientific interest in the topic. In the past thirty years, well over a thousand studies investigating the role of televised violence have been published by the scientific community. The bulk of the research focuses on one compelling question: Is there a link between viewing violent behavior on television and the viewer's own subsequent aggressive behavior? From the start, efforts at testing this hypothesis have triggered a rigorous debate. Complete with political intrigue and factious in-fighting, the history of consensus-reaching in the field proves to be an engaging tale in itself.

Though studies on televised violence quietly dated back to as early as 1955, psychologist Albert Bandura brought the issue to the public's attention in the 1960s. In the 1963 Look magazine article "What TV Violence Can Do To Your Child," Bandura put into popular form the theories and hypotheses that he and his students had been testing for several years. Though the initial intent of Bandura's work was to validate his evolving social learning theory, along the way he implicated television as a source of teaching aggression.

According to Bandura's social learning theory, children learn their personalities from experiences and interactions with culture, subculture, family, and peers. The process of modeling, in particular, plays a fundamental role in the child's social development. As a result, Bandura theorized, the best and most effective way to teach children new ways of acting is to show them the behavior you wish them to learn and display.

Though social learning experiments had been conducted with laboratory animals for years, Bandura set out to test the theory on humans. In a series of now-famous "Bobo" studies, Bandura and his students turned to the new and controversial medium of television, testing the correlation between a child's viewing novel aggressive behavior and the child's own subsequent aggressive actions. Though the experiments varied slightly in focus and execution, the primary premise was generally the same: In most tests, preschool-aged children watched a film projected on a simulated TV set in which an actor (or a "model") verbally and physically attacked a large inflated plastic clown. After viewing the film, the children were left to play with a similar Bobo doll and a variety of other toys for 10 minutes. Observers hidden behind a one-way mirror recorded any imitative aggressive actions. Over and over again, children viewing aggressive models were observed exhibiting similar aggressive behaviors.

Some of Bandura's specific experiments are noteworthy. In a 1965 study he examined the effect that perceived consequences would have on children's aggressive actions. In the experiment, some aggressive models were punished for their actions, others were rewarded, and still others had no consequences. Children viewing the rewarded and no-consequence models exhibited significant imitative aggression, a troublesome finding in view of TV's consequence-free world. Moreover, even those who viewed the punished model were able to replicate the aggressive action upon request, indicating that the actions--though perhaps not immediately imitated--still had been acquired or learned.6 In another experiment, Bandura studied how viewing an aggressive cartoon cat on television, as opposed to a human model, might affect children. The results showed that children learned as readily from Herman the Cat as they did from a human adult model, implicating television's seemingly innocuous cartoon creatures as models for aggression.7 While Bandura's early studies have been eyed critically for their low ecological validity (the viewing experience in the Bobo studies was hardly typical and the clown, after all, was not human), they provided an important window for further investigation and debate.