Violence and the Media Flashcards
What do other studies suggest about violence and the media?
Anderson and Bushman = compared the effects of playing violent vs non-violent games, found that violent games = psychological arousal, not aggression. So violent games are just more exciting.
Fesbach and Sanger = 6 week diet of TV, 2 groups watching both violent and non-violent programmes. The group who watched non-violent films became more aggressive, theorised that violence in the media is cathartic, preventing people from being violent in real life.
What are the criticisms of Bandura’s study of the Bobo Doll?
- Lacks validity as artificial environment.
- A Bobo Doll is designed to be hit, learning how to play with a toy.
- Difficult to conclude that they would be more likely to be aggressive in real life.
However, Jamie Bulger, Nathan Martinez, Columbine Shootings etc, all support Bandura’s study.
What is Desensitisation?
A more plausible argument is that the steady diet of violence from the media causes desensitisation, where we come to accept a higher level of violence as normal.
What are other criticisms of the view that violence is caused by the media?
- Countries like Japan/Canada have just as much media violence as US/UK, but less social violence.
- Why do some members of an audience copy violence whilst others do not?
- Is society more violent today? E.g children used to be hung for minor crimes, socially acceptable to give beatings to women and children.
What are the problems of researching media violence?
- Violence is hard to define in the first place.
- How can the effects on violence be measured? (if a definition of violence is decided)
- Often done in labs, so raises the question of whether people would react the same in real life.
- Children = susceptible to influence, so should be done on adults.
Evaluation points for media violence:
Sophisticated media users can distinguish between fiction and real violence. Buckingham = children interpret media violence sophisticatedly.
Wood = horror films used as a macho rite of passage.
- Audiences are not homogenous: age, intellect, culture, gender etc, as well as family background and parental control all affects a person’s susceptibility to violence in the media.
