Images of violence and death are a pervasive feature of everyday life in media dominated societies. There is a concern that this avalanche of violent media could affect our behaviour, making us act violently in turn – a case of monkey see, monkey do.
Frustratingly, there is no clear consensus on the issue in the scientific community, despite the large amount of research that has been done on the subject. Concerned mothers, politicians and news broadcasters are quick to blame outbursts of violence, like the recent Virginia Tech massacre, on a singular causative agent: violence found in various media forms.
However, not everyone agrees with this idea. Professor Jonathan Freedman of the Psychology department at the University of Toronto specializes in media violence studies. His position on the issue is that there is not enough evidence to show that watching violence produces it.
The vast number of different studies done on the topic is subject to many problems, the greatest being the inability to experiment on human subjects.
Freedman said, “As with any of these complex social issues it’s hard to get perfect science because you can’t do an experiment. You can’t take people and assign them to watch violent television from the age of two and [have] others not watching. That would be a perfect experiment, but you can’t do that.”
Finding a standardized way to measure aggression levels is another problem. It is difficult to compare two different studies on violence when distinct methods of assessing aggression levels are used.
“As I say to my students – no one ever said research is easy. Particularly when you deal with real world problems, it’s very hard to get measures, because you can’t allow people, when you are watching them, to hurt each other.” said Freedman.
Some research resolves this problem by using discrete events that can be counted. In one study, young boys were observed on the playground and the number of fights they got into were tallied. Longitudinal approaches that track a set of individuals over many years use actual occurrences, such as criminal offences, to compare violence levels between the individuals. These types of studies are still not ideal, as confounding factors are not controlled for as in experimental designs. These factors could have a substantial effect on the outcome of any given study. One fact that can be agreed on by most people is that violent imagery has never been as brutal as it is today.
“I don’t think that there’s any question that the violence that does appear on television is more vivid and lurid and explicit than what would have been shown, say, 50 years ago.”
If those who say violence in the media causes violent behaviour are right, it would be expected that crime rates and other measures of violent behaviour would rise as a result. Oddly enough, the opposite is true; highlighting again that this is not a simple problem with a singular cause. Since 1992, when violent video games started to gain popularity, the violent crime rate has dropped considerably in the United States and Canada.
Rather than pursuing the subject further in order to attain greater clarity, Freedman believes there is little value in further study of the issue.
“I think it should be dropped, frankly. It’s enough already. We’ve done hundreds of studies and not gotten much. But I don’t think it will be [dropped]. I think they’ll just keep plugging away. Those who believe it’s harmful are absolutely convinced it’s harmful and they keep doing research to try to show that it’s harmful. There are very few people trying to show the opposite. You can’t get funding to show that something isn’t true. It’s very hard to demonstrate that.”
In the aftermath of tragic, hyper-violent events like the recent Virginia Tech massacre, it is understandable that a scapegoat is sought to absorb the blame and help make sense of an appallingly senseless act.
“This is just a knee jerk response by those who want to blame everything on media violence,” Freedman explained. “God knows that everyone was very upset by Virginia Tech. People say things have gotten worse and worse and worse in terms of school violence, when in fact, they haven’t.”
