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Violence in Media Causing Violent Behavior: Urban Myth?

Re: I Don't know About A Full Scale Riot:

AndroMan said:
We're talking about a ballet audience, after all. :p
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You'd be surprised...
 
Since this is was an interesting debate, I thought I'd resurrect it with some quotes from this site about the myth of media violence:

http://www.abffe.com/myth1.htm

It's easy to believe that violence is getting worse: We hear about it all the time. It's easy to believe that mock violence in media is influencing behavior: What other violence do suburban kids see? Without question, popular culture is a lot more raucous than it used to be. It's a wild pageant, and it scares the culture police. But however many national leaders and prestigious institutions endorse the theory, it's a fraud. There's no evidence that mock violence in media makes people violent, and there's some evidence that it makes people more peaceful.

To start with, take a look at Col. Dave's claim about improved medical technology saving potential homicides. Of 1.5 million violent crimes in the U.S. in 1998, 17,000 were murders. Of the remaining number, according to the FBI, only 20,331 resulted in major injuries (the rest produced minor physical injuries or none at all). So if all the assault victims with major injuries had also died - improbable even with 1930's medicine - the 1998 U.S. murder rate would only have been double what it was - that is, would have been about 13 per 100,000 population rather than 6.3. But even 13 is well below the 23 per 100,000 murder rate of 13th-century England, the 45 per 100,000 of 15th-century Sweden, the 47 per 100,000 of 15th-century Amsterdam. We don't live in "the most violent era in peacetime human history"; we live in one of the least violent eras in peacetime human history.

Jib Fowles, a slight, handsome media scholar at the University of Houston at Clear Lake, worked his way through the media effects literature carefully and thoroughly when he was researching a book on the subject, mischievously titled The Case for Television Violence, which was published last year. Although Grossman and others are fond of claiming that there have been more than 2,500 studies showing a connection between violent media and aggressive behavior (the number actually refers to the entire bibliography of a major government report on the subject), the independent literature reviews Fowles consulted identified only between one and two hundred studies, the majority of them laboratory studies. Very few studies have looked at media effects in the real world, and even fewer have followed the development of children exposed to violent media over a period of years.

In typical laboratory studies, researchers require a control group of children to watch a "neutral" segment of a television show while a test group watches a segment which includes what the researchers believe to be violent content - an actor or a cartoon character pretending to assault other actors or cartoon characters. Both segments are taken out of context, although sometimes the children watch entire shows. After this exposure, the researchers observe the children at play together or interacting with toys to see if they behave in ways the researchers consider aggressive. Aggression may mean merely verbal aggression, or rough play such as pushing and shoving, or hitting. Hitting is a rare outcome in these experiments; the usual outcome is verbal banter or rough play. Since the researchers, by the very act of showing the tapes, have implicitly endorsed the behavior they require the kids to watch, and further endorse the kids' response by standing around counting aggressive acts rather than expressing disapproval or intervening as a teacher or parent might do, the experimental arrangement is not exactly neutral.

.
 
I dont watch violent films simply because my parents never did, and dissaproved of them.
My parents vetted most of my viewing, (something few parents do these days) and though I was sometimes allowed to watch questionable material, it was always with the underlaying response of `you shouldnt really be taking this seriously`

I belive that cases linked to TV violence are commited by children who have seen such things but without parental guidance and dissaproval. Its not the media that teach morals but parents.
 
Dansette said:
Watch Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" - very interesting on the culture of fear. He uses video games as an examle of violent media and points out that many of them are developed in Japan and are enthusiastically received there, but there are a couple of hundred murders in Japan per year, and about 14,000 in the US.

I personally think it depends on the person watching as to how much impact it has on them.

Also, you know when the media goes 'standards of education are falling'? Apparently, it was the Ancient Greeks who first worried about that. Standards have been falling for thousands of years, so we must be now minus!
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The effect of media violence, and even gun availability, must be terribly localized. Suspicious thing, whenever bad **** happens, it must be guns, media, drugs, The Devil, rock n roll, evil clowns from Pluto, fill in the blank.

Couldn't be hordes of socio-politically and economically marginalized minorities, Manichaean political systems, corrupt education, overworking, overtaxation, physical illness, mental illness, on and on and on. Those sorts of things don't exist in America, don't you know it.

Read some now virtually lost-to-memorycommentary somewhere about Columbine. According to the author's intriguing theory, Americans find it easier to think of such tragedies in terms of causes(media, drugs, guns) than face the fact that some people are (probably born) lacking to greater or lesser degress in conscious and humane concern. It isn't supposed to be possible for nature to produce a human being who can and will naturally cut his own grandmother's throat and cash her SS check 15 minutes later...but it is. Exposes the radical free-floating pointlessness of existence; John Wayne can ride off into the sunset, but in a million years he'll still be as dead as if he never had a name. And then the sun goes out.

Does this sort of blame-game go on in Europe? I assume it does, but I'm also betting it's less viscious. Besides, most stuff worth banning is already dead and done in most places over there :blah: Or do I have it backwards?
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Violence in Media: Urban Myth?

Inverurie Jones said:
Nah; telly's a disease. In what way does TV require you to use your brain? None at all. It just encourages you to sit there, getting fat and stupid. Even many documentaries.
Novels can get into your brain, but they (mostly) do it in a good way, which is how Quixote himself sees it...
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I've recently been getting into Neuro Linguistic Programming, and as a side topic, hypnotism.

And one day it just clicked with me that TV is actually very, very hypnotic - it easily puts you in a trance state.

You have a box that provides both visual and auditory information, which are the most consciously conspicuous senses, and constantly provides high-amounts of input to you when you're in a passive state (sat on your bum). This effectively excludes the rest of the world, and you can get hypnotically drawn in to the programming - often regardless of content.

How often have you found yourself sat there, having just 'snapped out of it', and having just been watching hours of crap TV?

Filling up the senses in a very powerful way during a passive activity is something that TV does but music and books don't do - there's a very different effect on the mind. It'd be interesting to measure the brain states of a TV viewer and compare it to a hypnotic subject.

I'm positive it has a hypnotic effect (plenty of conspiracy goodness in that subject! :D ;) ) and therefore the issue of inadvertant - or purposeful, such as in the case of adverts - hynotic suggestions and commands is something worth thinking about. Keep that in mind.
 
I think Moore's point in Bowling for Columbine was that media does not create the violent rolemodels so much as it evokes an atmosphere of insecurity, especially through low quality news media.

which strikes me as a good point.
 
Vitrius said:
Does this sort of blame-game go on in Europe? I assume it does, but I'm also betting it's less viscious. Besides, most stuff worth banning is already dead and done in most places over there :blah: Or do I have it backwards?
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It has in Britain. The most high profile I should think is the James Bulger murder by two young boys. It has been a while since I had to do research on this so forgive me if all the details are not 100%.

I think the media jumped on the knowledge that one of the killer's parents had rented 'Child's Play' from a video library and allowed his son to watch it and the thought was that this had somehow influenced the boy into killing the 4-year-old.

Well it transpired that the video had been rented 6-8 weeks previous to the murder and the child had not seen the film, as his parents had separated.

It didn't stop the media (TV and papers) from jumping on the whole 'Video Nasties' angle and trying to ban such films here.
 
sorry, just to backtrack a minute to the "Rites of spring" bit. The audience rioted that night because the whole production was a balls-up. Stravinsky had composed it as a ballet for the orchestra, not necessarily as a ballet for dancers, so when Nijinksy and co tried putting it on stage it was a bit ofa disaster. Total mayhem, noone knew what they were doing. The audience got a bit brassed off as a consequence.
 
Interesting how the Rites of Spring riot has become one of the classic 'Shock of the New' icons - a case of commentators seeing what they want, I guess.

I also find it surprising that an audience that had already experienced productions of Jarry would be shocked by the Rites...their being brassed because it was crap sounds attractive and very plausible :)
 
Well I think the whole "guns are bad" thing is a bit silly. It is who owns the guns. That is why there should be strict screening process. I grew up around guns and my Grandpa kept loaded guns in the house... I nver touched them and knew that if I did I would be in for it. My dad took me shooting and I had a boyfriend in highschool that was a champion target shooter. It all comes down to responsibility. I personally don't have a gun and I don't want a gun. I do believe in gun control and much stricter screening for ownership of guns. But to blame violence on the fact that the gun was there is a bit silly.
 
Now thats funny.

I know a guy who goes to Switzerland a lot, he says its is a good place but by our (and many other nations standards) a bit funny.
For instance they have a very high gun ownership.
Of course that is because of the national guard (they arent just armed with penknives you know)

And this got me to thinking, guns in the hands of police or crimminals (as promoted by the US media) create insecurity. guns in the hands of target shooters and hunters just plain neutral, but knowing the guy with the gun is there to protect you and your country, thats a different matter indeed.

the attitudes are very different

Lets face it America is a crime culture, and so this encourages crime (or alternatley, being a victim)

Unfortunatley in the UK a lot of the Yank media we see is of the less than positive type. (I am not pro american but I sure would like to see better yank media. Like as not it would make me a pro american)
 
Well all the men in my family growing up hunted and my great granfather, grandfater, uncle and cousin are all in law einforcement. My grandfather actually tracked down the criminals when they escaped from prison and rarely carried a gun to do so. His guns were for hunting birds and deer. My brother in law is an avid outdoorsman and a hunter all though he uses and bow. My dad would hunt when I was a child as a family activity and hasn't done it since my gramps died. The thing is if you are a hunter or a target shooter, you are taught gun safety. You learn it is not a toy. That is the main thing teaching proper use and safety. But honestly if you aren't a hunter in law enforcement or military why would you want a gun?
 
Did you know the GB olympic marksman team have to train in Switzerland?
 
What a crick of s**t:

Grand Theft Auto comes under fire

One of Scotland's biggest hi-tech success stories is facing increasing pressure from campaigners against violent video games.
US lawyers are bringing actions against Edinburgh-based Rockstar North, the producers of Grand Theft Auto (GTA).

It follows claims by teenage boys in Tennessee that they were acting out the game when they shot at vehicles.

But games industry representatives say there is no established link between games and violent behaviour.

Last summer, a man was killed and a woman wounded after being shot in their cars near the Tennessee town of Newport.

William Buckner, 16, and his step-brother Joshua, 13, had taken two rifles from their home, hid in trees and started firing at passing vehicles on a busy highway.


We are suing the boys, their parents, WalMart who sold the game and the video games companies including Rockstar
Jack Thomson
Attorney
The pair pleaded guilty at a juvenile court to reckless homicide.
They were sent to a detention centre, but in their defence they told investigators that they got the idea to shoot cars from GTA3.

Their parents also blamed the industry and are calling for the GTA series to be taken off the shelves.

Miami attorney Jack Thomson has tried to build a link between violent games and several killings carried out by teenagers.

Mr Thomson is representing the victims killed and wounded in the Tennessee shootings and is suing for £60m.

He told the BBC's Frontline Scotland programme: "We are suing the boys, their parents, WalMart who sold the game and the video games companies including Rockstar that are responsible for designing a game that they knew would result in these type of consequences."

'No scientific link'

No-one from Rockstar would comment on the action against them but the Washington-based Entertainment Software Association dismissed any possible link.

President Doug Lowenstein said: "The notion that they don't know right from wrong, that they don't know that picking up a weapon and shooting people is morally wrong and that somehow 'a video game made me do it' is just ridiculous."

He added: "I think it's a fair point of concern, but I don't think the science even remotely supports the proposition that playing a violent game turns you into a violent person."


The GTA series has been one of the world's most popular games, selling more than 30 million copies since its launch in 1997.
Speaking last year, Sam Houser, the president of Rockstar Games, said how people behaved in the game was their own choice.

Mr Houser said: "We try to put people in a world, let the world exist around them, and then let them make their own decisions.

"So if you want to go out there and use a gun and do bad things you can, but, at the same time, if you want to go round there, just cruise and get in a car, get on a motorbike or just meet people you can."

Another Miami lawyer, Barry Silver, represents several Haitian community groups upset over a mission in the GTA Vice City game where players have to hunt down a Haitian gang.

Multi-million pound industry

Mr Silver said: "When you find out what your kids are being exposed to you will shudder in horror.

"It's a training film for mass murderers and it has no place in anybody's home who cares anything about their kids."

Rockstar has agreed to remove the reference to Haitians, but Mr Silver wants existing copies withdrawn.

The case is waiting to be dealt with by the circuit court in Palm Beach County.

Any successful legal action could have a serious impact on the games industry in Scotland which employs about 500 people and has a multi-million pound turnover.



And incase you missed that:

Any successful legal action could have a serious impact on the games industry in Scotland which employs about 500 people and has a multi-million pound turnover.
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How I love a litigation culture :hmph:
 
Imagine the social strides thatv would be made if 1/3 of the energy that went towards fighting violence in media were directed at poverty, education, and job creation.

Agree with your accesment, VG!
 
Mr. R.I.N.G. said:
Imagine the social strides thatv would be made if 1/3 of the energy that went towards fighting violence in media were directed at poverty, education, and job creation.
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but you can't make money out of being a good person or seeking to progress sociaty.
 
TV Causes Sex

Or, at least more promiscuous behavior, according to THIS STORY

Study Links TV to Teen Sexual Activity
By Michael Conlon

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Teenagers who watch a lot of television with sexual content are twice as likely to engage in intercourse than those who watch few such programs, according to a study published on Tuesday. The study covered 1,792 adolescents aged 12 to 17 who were quizzed on viewing habits and sexual activity and then surveyed again a year later. Both regular and cable television were included.

"This is the strongest evidence yet that the sexual content of television programs encourages adolescents to initiate sexual intercourse and other sexual activities," said Rebecca Collins, a psychologist at the RAND Corp. who headed the study. "The impact of television viewing is so large that even a moderate shift in the sexual content of adolescent TV watching could have a substantial effect on their sexual behavior," she added.

The study found that youths who watched large amounts of programming with sexual content were also more likely to initiate sexual activities short of intercourse, such as oral sex. It found that shows where sex was talked about but not depicted had just as much impact as the more explicit shows. "Both affect adolescents' perceptions of what is normal sexual behavior and propels their own sexual behavior," Collins said.

She said the 12-year-olds who watched a lot of sexual content behaved like the 14- or 15-years-olds who watched the least amount. "The advancement in sexual behavior we saw among kids who watched a lot of sexual television was striking." Her comments were released in a statement in conjunction with publication of the study in the September issue of "Pediatrics," the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The survey did not break down the amount of sexual exposure in terms of hours per week or percentages of material viewed, Collins said in an interview. It did find that the 10 percent of those who watched the most television with sexual content were twice as likely to have initiated sexual intercourse when checked a year later than adolescents who were among the 10 percent who watched the least amount of sexual content.

"The best way for parents who are trying to figure out what is a lot versus little is to realize that the average (U.S.) child watches about three hours of television a day, and that the heaviest rates of sexual content are in prime time which is probably what those hours are made of," she said. The report said earlier studies found that about two-thirds of TV entertainment programs contain sexual content, ranging from jokes and innuendo to intercourse and other behaviors.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
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I'm still curious to find out how they deconvolve the reverse result, i.e. that people with an interest in activity X (e.g. sex, violence, stamp-collecting, etc.) will tend to watch t.v. shows with a high X content. I might be missing something, but I couldn't find any evidence that this possibility had been considered in the previously discussed study. (Then again, the news article has probably been dumbed down a lot from the original study.)
 
Sorry, I haven't read the whole thread so forgive me if I'm repeating. The whole 'violence in the media' thing isn't new. My favourite is Dr Frederick Wertham's book "The Seduction of the Innocent" which basically said that; all juvenile delinquents read comics, therefore comics cause juvenile delinquncy. Totally disregarding the fact that practically every child in the country read the same comic books, and only a tiny minority were delinquents.
 
Ozymandias said:
Sorry, I haven't read the whole thread so forgive me if I'm repeating. The whole 'violence in the media' thing isn't new. My favourite is Dr Frederick Wertham's book "The Seduction of the Innocent" which basically said that; all juvenile delinquents read comics, therefore comics cause juvenile delinquncy. Totally disregarding the fact that practically every child in the country read the same comic books, and only a tiny minority were delinquents.
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Never let the obvious get in the way of a good theory ;)
 
I thought this was relevant:

'REDRUM' focus of lawsuit

By Rick Carroll/Aspen Daily News Staff Writer




A local homebuilder has been stung with accusations of harassment by painting the letters "REDRUM" on the wall of a home he was remodeling and hitting on a client by saying he wanted to "kiss and lick" her.

The lawsuit against Robert Mineo, who is the president of Aspen-based Mineo & Associates Fine Home Builders Inc., was filed this week in Pitkin County District Court, and sits against a backdrop of prior civil allegations between him and client Karen Justis of San Francisco.

Mineo & Associates currently is suing a trust in which Justis is a member for unpaid bills in connection to the remodeling of a Hopkins Avenue residence.

But Justis has fired back against Mineo, claiming he harassed and threatened her on an unspecified date by painting the red letters "REDRUM" at the home in question. "REDRUM" is the word "murder" spelled backwards and was popularized in "The Shining" motion picture.

Justis also has accused Mineo of entering her home without knocking or ringing the doorbell in October 2002, and telling her, "I thought I'd come over here and kiss and lick you."

Those two instances, according to the lawsuit, came when Justis was trying to discuss problems with bookkeeping and remodeling work performed on the Hopkins Avenue home by Mineo.

Mineo declined to comment Thursday, and referred questions to his attorney, Deborah Davis, who was in Africa and could not be reached for comment.

"(Mineo's) conduct of insulting, ignoring, degrading and harassing Justis, including his statement to the effect that he would 'kiss and lick you' is extremely egregious conduct," the suit says.

The suit, filed by Aspen law firm Garfield & Hecht PC, seeks a six-member jury trial, along with attorney's fees, punitive damages and other costs.

"Mrs. Justis felt that he acted inappropriately and that's why we're doing this," said attorney Matt Ferguson of Garfield & Hecht.
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http://www.aspendailynews.com/articles.cfm?id=6
 
In a roundup of weird things that have happened in the Baltic area in recent years they give this:

Brutal killers

It is still unknown why two action movie-inspired young cadets from a Russian military academy illegally entered Estonia to practice what they preached. In 2002 Yuri Ustimenko and Dmitri Medvedev committed seven murders and wounded six people in Estonia and Latvia. The two kept a diary and took photos of their deeds, seemingly imitating some “Natural-Born-Killers”-like movie. Medvedev was eventually killed by the police and Ustimenko captured. His appeal for a softer sentence was rejected last week and he will serve his life sentence in Tartu prison.
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http://www.baltictimes.com/art.php?art_id=10975
 
A Natural Born Killers-like movie?

You mean they killed people with guns and enjoyed it then don't you.
Hmmm...The only real question is how two psychotic individuals ended up in the army in the first place?


Actually no, that's not really a question at all.
 
I always thought that serial killers frequently kept momentoes of their crimes, so photos and a diary don't seem to require any cinematic inspiration. (Then again, it may be that I'm just remembering something from a film. ;) )
 
After reading through this whole thing, remembering the great debates & all, I'm still left with one large question about the claims of media violence:

If you have a belief that viewing media violence leads to real-world violencewhat special communication does television, moives, and video games have that other media don't have that allows for it to create a desire to violence in the minds of the "vulnerable"?

And I think that when I linked this article before expounding on the myth of media violence:

http://www.abffe.com/myth1.htm

I don't believe the author interview was up:

http://www.abffe.com/rhodesqa.htm
ABFFE: Politicians claim that the scientific evidence that media violence is harmful is as strong as the evidence that smoking causes cancer. Is that true?

RHODES: The supposed analogy between smoking/cancer and media violence/violence was invented, so far as I can tell, by Rowell Huesmann, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and the most prominent current exponent of the media violence theory. I discuss his work at length in my report "The Media Violence Myth." Huesmann bases his claim for a similarity on the numerical similarity of the correlations. But in fact the similarity stops there, at the trivial level of two similar numbers.

Smoking is an identifiable and quantifiable behavior. Lung cancer is a discrete biological entity which any trained observer can recognize and which is the outcome of a series of specific biological processes. Media violence is a social construct that depends entirely on what one group or individual or another defines it to be. Huesmann considers Three Stooges comedies to be violent, whereas most of us consider them to be funny. He considers Roadrunner cartoons to be extremely violent, whereas most of us, including four-year-olds, recognize that they're comedic fantasies with no direct connection to the real world. One of the most glaring omissions in so-called media violence studies is athletic events. Football, hockey and other sports fill hours of air and cable time, yet none of the studies clock children's exposure to their real, not mock, violence. So what is media violence? Not, certainly, a clearly defineable concept.

Nor is "violence" the measure that Huesmann and others have generally used in their research; rather, they study what they call "aggression," which they define differently from one study to the next if they define it at all. Sometimes they seem to be talking about verbal aggression, sometimes physical, and the physical may vary from posturing to pushing to hitting. In the real world, of course, aggression in many contexts is considered to be a virtue, not a vice--ask political candidates and corporate CEOs whether aggression is a virtue or a social problem.

Finally, the questionable correlation Huesmann claims to have found between media violence and violence is based on a sample of a few hundred people. The correlation between smoking and cancer is far more robust, with tens and hundreds of thousands of cases in the sample.

Smoking/cancer and media violence/violence are not comparable correlations.

ABFFE: Why are some social scientists defending the media violence hypothesis if the evidence is so weak?

RHODES: Social scientists are not immune from wishful thinking, ambition, inadequate logical skills and yearnings to ride popular bandwagons in the great morality parade. It's very difficult to study group behavior in human beings. Correlational studies are about the best that can be done, and correlations, by definition, do not reveal causes. They only reveal interesting patterns that may (or may not) lead researchers to causes. That means the social sciences depend much more heavily on interpretation than the hard sciences, opening a broad playing field for mischief, wish fulfillment and deliberate distortion. I found much that I believe to be unethical and even fraudulent in the media violence research I investigated.
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I think this fits here, anyway the studies didn't stand up to scrutiny.

Research linking violent entertainment to aggression retracted after scrutiny

As Samuel West combed through a paper that found a link between watching cartoon violence and aggression in children, he noticed something odd about the study participants. There were more than 3000—an unusually large number—and they were all 10 years old. “It was just too perfect,” says West, a Ph.D. student in social psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Yet West added the 2019 study, published in Aggressive Behavior and led by psychologist Qian Zhang of Southwest University of Chongqing, to his meta-analysis after a reviewer asked him to cast a wider net. West didn’t feel his vague misgivings could justify excluding it from the study pool. But after Aggressive Behavior published West’s meta-analysis last year, he was startled to find that the journal was investigating Zhang’s paper while his own was under review.

It is just one of many papers of Zhang’s that have recently been called into question, casting a shadow on research into the controversial question of whether violent entertainment fosters violent behavior. Zhang denies any wrongdoing, but two papers have been retracted. Others live on in journals and meta-analyses—a “major problem” for a field with conflicting results and entrenched camps, says Amy Orben, a cognitive scientist at the University of Cambridge who studies media and behavior. And not just for the ivory tower, she says: The research shapes media warning labels and decisions by parents and health professionals.

The investigations were triggered by Illinois State University psychologist Joe Hilgard, who published a blog post last month cataloging his concerns about Zhang’s work. Hilgard was initially impressed when he came across a 2018 paper of Zhang’s in Youth & Society, another study with 3000 subjects. “I was like, holy smokes!” he says. The study found some teenagers were more aggressive after playing violent video games. Given the huge sample size, it had the potential to be a “powerful chunk of evidence,” Hilgard says.

But he found the paper’s statistics mathematically impossible. Zhang and his co-authors reported high levels of statistical significance for their finding, but the reported differences in the effects of violent games versus nonviolent games were too small for that high statistical significance to be possible. Hilgard alerted Zhang and the journal, and Zhang submitted a correction. Hilgard says that made the statistics seem more plausible, but they were still incorrect. ...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...rtainment-aggression-retracted-after-scrutiny
 
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