Violence on media effects audience? Vol. 2

Many scientists researched effects of violence showed through video, mostly with laboratory's experiments and polls.

William Belson explored violence effect on group of 1565 young people between 13 and 16 years old from London. He divided Experimental and Control groups on group whose participants are fond of aggressive scenes and on one whose participants aren’t. After two years of research he appointed that “aggressive young men” committed a lot of violence, fans of action videos committed 11,27 % more violent deeds then anyone else, and 49 % of them committed rough violent deeds.

Albert Banura, psychologist from Stanford, made an experiment in kindergarten with children from 3 to 5 years old. One person would take a doll, swear and beat it up in front of the kids. At first children would be confused, but when they took them to the next room, which was filled with similar dolls, all of the kids started doing the same. This experiment confirmed that there is a short period effect of violence on youth showed on screen.

Psychologist Steven Brody claims the opposite. In his researches he pointed out the confirmation of theory of catarza: “Observation of “played violence” helps preventing violence in real life, being that TV shows and movies can canalize aggressive expressions and feelings; their aim should be absorbing aggressive feelings and stopping from sense of danger and antagonism."
Scientists S. Freshbach and R. Singer agreed with him and showed, through their researches, that children acted more violent after watching TV shows like »Lessi«, than after shows like »FBI«.

Scientist Huesmann made the most important long-term research in this field in 2003. He used the sample of 330 kids, who were at the beginning of the research in 1977. from 6 to 10 years old. And then, after 15 years, he used the same sample on how did video violence effect them. Key result of the research was that video violence showed to children in their early age, afterwards influence on aggressive behavior. Author claimed that cause of this connection is viewer’s equalizing to aggressive protagonists and their apprehension that TV shows are real. Effect of violence on media has been established apart from social status, intellect or parental model of the used sample.


There are also long-term researches that didn’t show increase of violent and antisocial behavior under the media influence.
After inducting TV at Small Island Saint Helens in south Atlantic, study pointed out no increase of violent behavior of children, even though the amount of TV violence was the same as in Great Britain. Authors of the study claimed that the reason for this lies in that that this small community has firm social structures, which prohibits that video violence provokes any violent, or some other antisocial behavior. They didn’t point out that the kids didn’t learn how to behave antisocial; they pointed out that their environment restrain them to behave like that.