There was some article I believe was posted here before about how porn reduces rape cases due to it “fulfills the needs of the rapists so he or she won’t commit such acts”, and it related the same trend to violence in the media. More violent movies means less crime. It sounds incredulous and obscure, but I think of it like a quota. A <i>violence</i> quota. The more they see, the less they want.
How does watching a tape give a rapist the feeling of power over a woman? I wasn’t aware most rapists were out to get laid, most of them are psychopaths who do it for the power trip that comes from emotional crippling an otherwise normal woman. And i’d wager to bet that most people who “get off on violence” in a way that watching violence on TV satisfies their desires make up a small amount of violent crime, considering most of it is a “heat of the moment” decision. A drug dealer rips you off, you get pissed, grab your gun and shoot him. At what point do you have time to go watch scarface and get the “need to kill” out of your system here?
Sorry i can’t quote from 18th century literature or call up some obscure university study to back myself up like 99% of the rest of the posting population here who instantly become masters of whatever field is being discussed at any given time, but what you said just doesn’t make sense 
Hey, I’m just shortening the article into a paragraph.
Considering I said other factors also influence a person’s disposition towards violence (including the word etc), I believe I already acknowledged that point.
And when releasing these studies, the sociologists do know how to control for other variables to find out whether it’s correlation or causation. Even when controlling for other variables, such as stable family or what other factos may exist, violent media has been shown to have a small but statistically significant (not significant, statistically significant) effect.
Yeah, the general consensus is that consumption of violent media (which includes video games) <i>do</i> have short-term and positively correlated effects with tendency towards aggression and violence.
Correlation still doesn’t prove causation. Its not because people drown more in the summer and people eat more ice cream in the summer that people drown more because they ate more ice cream. To prove causation, you need to perform better studies and experiements than correlational studies and that’s a fact of science and epidemiology.
Its easy to eliminate all confounds if killers like to play Doom more than watch Barney and the Teletubbies, to use an extreme example.
There are a lot of things that can actually be increasing the rate of violent behavior at the same time that the media’s become more violent. The media has only gotten more violent as it has paid off to be more violent. Its simple that since people demand it more, that the society and culture itself is changing, which means that the media is a reflection, a symptom, a sign, whatever you wanna call it, of the malaise of society. Not a cause. A confound is something associated with both the cause and the end product but having no causal relationship between the 2.
Finally, continuing to emphasize the same points over and over and just adding an “etc”, isn’t clear.
I’m not disputing the existence of any correlation. In fact I probably should, what IS this mystical correlation? Show me this study so I can piece it apart because I fairly certain it’d be contraversial. Also, I can name you a lot of studies that have been made with a lot fancier and better aims than finding correlations that provided excellent results, which all ended up being_garbage_.
I’m disputing what you’re saying means. The US is the place with the most prevalent violence problems. The US however is exposed to the same things many other countries are. Therefore, the problem is US specific and is not based on this one factor, the media, that is found in all these places as the reaction is not uniform. The problem is much more complex and has to do with a lot more US-specific sociocultural factors than the armchair thinking being presented.
It could very well be that the media has the sause and effect reversed. I would maintain that violent people are more drawn to violent movies and games, because they already had a slightly greater tendency towards violence in the first place. In most cases, with games anyways, the entertainment can form as a release for such desires. Most countries throughout the world have a much lower violent crime rate, while watching the same violent movies and games.
There certainly seems to be a relationship between violent entertainment and violent acts, but it could very well be in the revers of the order that the medie is trying to portray.
The rape analogy doesn’t work right because rape is a crime of violene more than sex, and tends to stem from a number of psychological problems far more complex than simple violence.
More accurately would be people feeling angry playing GTA to go wild. I would expect this to be more likely to release tension, then to cause someone to go out and try it for real.
I’m all over the place with this post, and should edit it, but oh well.
This is a very good point. Art is a reflection of the artist’s environment. If the world is a violent place then television, video games, movies and other forms of media are going to have violent elements in their content.
And as said in the post above mine and probably earlier, violent people tend to like violent things. And by violent I don’t necesarily mean an extreme, as if anyone who likes violent video games would be a murderer but they find some sort of natural satisfaction in it.
Okay. I think I may have explained it poorly. The common experiment is one that involves surveying a large number of perople before viewing something violent, such as a football game or violent scene, with questions centered around aggression. After said event, the same people are surveyed, and they show, as a group, an increase in aggressive tendencies. There are of course other experiments which are more involved (and frankly I’m having a hard time summarizing because the words escape me) which make better use of controls and many different degrees of variables. They then use various statistical tools to determine whether the effects are correlative or causative by controlling for other possible causes, and the vast majority of the data gives the same trend. After watching something violent, people tend to have slightly more aggressive tendencies in the short term. It’s a short term effect, and I think I failed in making that clear.
As for the studies? They actually were controversial when first released because the commonly held, and not at all studied or tested, belief was the Catharsis Theory. There’s been decades of research since then. The ones I’m familiar with are
Effects on the Hostility of Spectators of Viewing Aggressive Sports, by Robert L. Arms; Gordon W. Russell; Mark L. Sandilands
Film Violence and Subsequent Aggressive Tendencies, by Leonard Berkowitz; Ronald Corwin; Mark Heironimus
Effects of Observing Athletic Contests on Hostility, by Jeffrey H. Goldstein; Robert L. Arms
TV Violence and Viewer Aggression: A Cumulation of Study Results 1956-1976, by F. Scott Andison (more of an aggregate study of ones over a 20 year period)
Various articles by Ronald Simons
There have been some others I’ve been exposed to in the abstract, but I can recall neither the author nor the title. Mea culpa. One did have an interesting test though where people exposed to Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood actually had less aggressive tendencies after watching that.
However, there are some studies which show this aggressive tendency rise may just be laboratory effects. One article by Richard Felson and another by Messner make this claim. The current research, if it’s even on going, is probably aimed at determining the extent of laboratory effects and trying to more naturally test the short-term and long-term effects.
Ok I’ve heard of a couple of those. What you’re saying is people tend to feel more aggressive after having seen aggressive things. I don’t think that’s necessarily a false result, but as you pointed out at the end, it might be a couple of things. My counter to the aggressive tendency possibility is that feeling a little more aggressive doesn’t translate into more violent behavior, which is ultimately what matters and what this is all about.
On a pseudo side note: it has been observed that there is a trend for more violent crimes to happen when it is warmer than when it is colder.
Even if violent videogames lead to real life violence, there are a ton of other factors which cause violence and are more important and where we should focus our efforts. For instance, poverty; or growing up in a violent home; or anything which exposes people to real violence.
People are more likely to leave their house when it is warmer.
But isn’t it then harder to act in cold blood? :runaway: