Does viewing media violence lead to aggression in children?
Younger and younger children our beginning to show increasingly violent behaviour. There has been continuing speculation over the main cause of this. The most important question is whether children being exposed to media violence really does reflect in their behaviour. Recent studies have stated that there is no correlation between media violence and children’s aggressive behaviour. The American Medical Association quoted; ‘Media violence affects children’s behaviour’ this can be explained by the learning approach. There are hundreds of shows which constantly show violence such as ‘wrestling’, ‘the sopranos’ or ‘Eastenders’. The learning approach might suggest that children are imitating the violence they see. Huston et al, 1992 carried out a study proving that once a child becomes eighteen they will have witnessed 200,000 acts of violence on television and in the media, including 40,000 murders. Kaiser Family Foundation 2005 shows that children aged between 8-14 spend more time in front of the computer; television and game consoles than any other activity in their lives expect sleeping.
There have been over 1000 studies on the effects of media violence. Most of the studies concluded that; ‘children who watch significant amounts of media violence are more likely to exhibit aggressive behaviour’ – Senate Committee on the Judiciary 1999. Bushman, 2001 said that children are affected by media violence at any age but younger children are most vulnerable as they are impressionable and cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy. The learning approach would state that the main reason that children are liable media violence is that they have learnt it through observing and imitating. Social learning theory says that for children to learn, two things have to happen; observation and imitation. The process is called modelling. The child must be motivated to imitate the behaviour, otherwise it won’t be reinforced.
The theory can be applied to media violence as the child observes the violence and is motivated by the fact that they are enjoying the show. Some violence may be consequence in being rewarded eg a wrestler’s belt. The children will also want to be rewarded so they will copy the behaviour they see. This is called vicarious reinforcement. Comstack (1994) and Huesmann (2001) proved that aggressive behaviour linked to game consoles that lack consequences that has been justified or includes a reward has a greater effect on children because they want a reward. Also if the violence is committed by an attractive or heroic person, the child will identify with them and the affect will be greater.
In 1963 Badura, Ross & Ross conducted a study to see the effect of exposure of media violence on children. The children were subjected to watching a role model being aggressive towards an inflatable bobo doll. Then a second group, a control group watched nothing. The children were later left in the room on their own, the children how had watch the role model were aggressive towards the doll, whereas the control group didn’t touch the doll. Bandura did a variation study where children were exposed to the same bobo doll situation on a television. The children who watched the incident on television showed the same amount of aggression to those who saw the model in real life. This supports the theory and the key issue.
Operant conditioning is useful and can explain learning. Many studies have been applied to operant conditioning including animal training and human behaviour. It does, however neglect other theories on learning, for example observation and imitation.
Not all media promotes violence, however all shows do involve violence and when children are exposed to it, it can easily lead to aggressive behaviour. This may be because of imitation through role models, identifying with them and operant conditioning. Eron et al measured the level of violence in TV programmes watched by 7 and 8 year olds and measured their aggression. They found a positive correlation between the two and an even stronger correlation of violence viewed and aggressiveness of teenage boys. This study and all the studies i have mentioned show how exposure of media violence to children can affect their aggressive behaviour.