TV and Film Violence and Its Influence on Social Behaviour
... Nowadays, moral pressure groups such as Mothers Against Murder And Aggression (MAMAA) have tried to protect children against popular literature, music, cinema, comics, television and video from fear that the exposure to immoral behaviour would corrupt young minds. When we consider this debate it’s is important to see the issue in a broader social, cultural and historical context and also to ask question: why is it such a popular subject? ... Conversely, the fact that TV does feature aggressive and violent behaviour cannot be ignored. Harris (1989) states that by the age of fourteen the average American child has seen 11,000 murders on TV. The type of programme matters for example, cartoons depict more violence than in many other fictional programmes, but children do distinguish between cartoon violence and more realistic violence. Violence is commonplace even on British TV even though studies have shown that it is much less ubiquitous than on American TV. The relationship between the viewing of violent films, videos and TV programmes and the aggressive behaviour by the viewers of such material has been researched greatly, in particular the behaviour of children. The dominant paradigm in TV research has become generally based upon the ‘effects’ of television and film. TV research has progressed from being portrayed as a matter of direct effect in the earlier days, to more sophisticated approaches in recent decades, as much more complex factors such as the variety of audience, individual differences and the importance of intervening variables were acknowledged. During the 1950’s, both Wilbur Schramm and Hilde Himmelweit suggested that the effects of TV violence vary according to the personal and social characteristics of viewers, and according to how violent acts were portrayed. ... Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll studies (Bandura, Ross & Ross 1961) were the most renowned experimental studies of aggressive behaviour in which children of nursery school age observed a playroom in which an adult was seen to be assaulting an inflatable doll. ... This suggests that seeing the model punished leads to less learning of the model’s behaviour. ... The children proceeded to assault the doll and so Bandura had proven that the children had still learned the behaviour but would only behave like it if offered an incentive. There was now a clear distinction between the acquisition of aggressive responses and the performance of aggressive acts - observation is sufficient for aggressive behaviour to be learned but reinforcement is necessary for aggressive acts to be performed. ... Similar studies have produced similar results with the suggestion that the more violence viewed, the greater the likelihood of aggressive behaviour.