h on media violence is often misunderstood by the general public. One reason has to do with research methodology. We can't randomly assign children early in their lives to watch different doses of violence on television and then 15 years later see which children committed violent crimes. But the same type of limitation also exists for medical research: We can't randomly assign groups of people to smoke differing amounts of cigarettes for 15 years, and then count the number of people who developed cancer.
Tobacco researchers conduct correlational studies in which they look at the amount people have smoked during their lives and then chart the rate at which they have succumbed to cancer. They control statistically for other factors, of course--other healthy and unhealthy behaviors that either reduce or promote the tendency to develop cancer. Then they can find out whether smoking contributed to cancer, over and above these other influences. And since they can't do cancer experiments on people, they use animal studies. These are artificial, but they tell us something about the short-term effects of tobacco that can't be found from correlational studiesthe animal experiments for cancer, these are not natural situations, but such experiments fill the gaps they cannot fill otherwise. Experiments are designed to show short-term effects, like increases in hostility or more accepting attitudes toward violence--changes that we know increase the likelihood of violent actions, both in the short term and in the long run. A second reason for the misunderstanding of the media-violence work is that most public discussions of the problem focus on criminal violence and ignore the other unhealthy outcomes that affect many more children. In an attempt to clarify the issues, I will first discuss the research consensus about some of the major consequences of exposure to