Violence on screens: what conclusions does a child draw from watching violence?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the early 1960s, psychologist Albert Bandura decided to find out if children tend to imitate aggressive behavior from adults. He took a huge inflatable clown doll, which he named Bobo, and made a film of how an adult aunt scolds him, pounds, kicks and even hits him with a hammer. Then he showed the video to a group of 24 preschoolers. The second group was shown the video without violence, and the third was shown nothing at all.

Then all three groups alternately fired into the room where Bobo the clown was, several hammers and even toy pistols, although no firearms were featured in any of the videos.

The children who watched the aggressive video wasted no time in torturing poor Bobo. One boy put a gun to the clown's head and began to whisper something about how he would gladly blow his brains out. There was not even a hint of violence in the other two groups.

After Bandura presented his findings to the scientific community, there were many skeptics who said that all this did not prove anything, since the rubber doll was invented to kick it.

Then Bandura made a film with mockery of a living adult dressed as a clown, then he gathered even more children, showed them his imperishable and again launched into the room to (now alive!) Bobo. As many of you have guessed, and without any experiment, the children began to insult, kick and beat the living clown with the same zeal as the first time.

This time, no one dared to dispute Bandura's assertion that children imitate the behavior of adults.

Across the industrialized world, 98% of households own a television. There are far fewer people with baths and telephones. Television creates global pop culture. In the average family, the TV is on for up to 7 hours a day: on average, each family member has 4 hours. What types of social behavior are modeled during these hours?

J. Gerbner and his other colleagues have watched prime time and Saturday morning programs every day for 30 years. What did they find? Two out of every three programs contain stories of violence (“acts of physical coercion accompanied by threats of beating or murder, or beating or murder as such”).

By the time they graduate from high school, a child has watched about 8,000 murder scenes and 100,000 other violent acts on television. This only applies to television, excluding other sources.

Reflecting on his calculations, carried out by him for 22 years, Gerbner concludes: “There have been more bloodthirsty eras in the history of mankind, but none of them was so saturated with images of violence as ours.

And who knows where this monstrous stream of visible violence will take us, seeping into every home through the flickering TV screens in the form of scenes of impeccably staged brutality. Advocates of the idea that the viewer is (not clear) … is freed from aggressive energy and thus television prevents aggression, might argue: “Television was not involved in the mass extermination of Jews and Native Americans. Television only reflects and caters to our tastes.” Critics of this theory argue: “But it is also true that with the advent of the television era in America (for example), violent crime began to increase several times faster than the population. It is unlikely that pop culture only passively reflects tastes, without influencing public consciousness in any way."

Do viewers imitate on-screen models of violence?

There are many examples of the reproduction of crimes shown on television. In a survey of 208 prisoners, every 9 out of 10 admitted that television programs on crime can teach new crime tricks. Every 4 out of 10 said they tried to commit some crimes they saw on TV.

In order to have scientific evidence to study the effect of television on crime, researchers use correlation and experimental methods in parallel. Can we conclude that the bloody TV program provides abundant food for aggression? Perhaps aggressive children prefer to watch aggressive programs? Or is there some other factor - say, low intelligence predisposes some children to both preferring aggressive programs and committing aggressive acts?

According to research, watching militants at age 8 moderately predetermines aggressiveness at age 19, but aggressiveness at age 8 does not predetermine being attracted to militants at age 19.

This means that it is not aggressive inclinations that make people lovers of “cool” films, but, on the contrary, “cool” films are capable of provoking a person to commit violence.

These findings have been confirmed in recent studies of 758 adolescents in Chicago and 220 adolescents in Finland. Moreover, when Iron and Hewsmann (American psychologists) turned to the protocols of the first study conducted with eight-year-olds, and found there data on those who were convicted of a crime, they found the following: 30-year-old men who watched a lot of “cool”TV broadcasts were more likely to commit serious crimes. But that's not all.

Everywhere and always with the advent of television, the number of murders increases. In Canada and the United States, between 1957 and 1974, with the proliferation of television, there were twice as many murders. In those regions covered by the census, where television arrived later, the wave of murders also rose later. Similarly, in the well-studied rural areas of Canada, where television arrived late, there was soon a doubling in the level of aggressiveness on the sports field. For skeptics, I note that the results of correlation and experimental studies have been repeatedly checked and selected in such a way that the presence of extraneous, "third" factors is excluded. Laboratory experiments, coupled with public concern, prompted 50 new studies to be submitted to the General Medical Administration. These studies confirmed that observing violence increases aggression.

The influence of the media on the development of child aggression

- Contemporary art changes and deforms the psyche of the child, influencing the imagination, giving new attitudes and patterns of behavior. False and dangerous values burst into children's consciousness from the virtual world: cult strength, aggression, rude and vulgar behavior, which leads to hyperexcitability of children.

- In Western cartoons, there is a fixation on aggression. The repeated repetition of scenes of sadism, when a cartoon character hurts someone, causes children to fixate on aggression and contributes to the development of appropriate behavioral models.

- Children repeat what they see on the screens, this is a consequence of identification. Identifying themselves with a creature, deviant behavior, which is not punished or even blamed on the screen, children imitate him and learn his aggressive behavior patterns. Albert Bandura, back in 1970, said that one television model could become an object of imitation for millions.

- Killing, in computer games, children experience a sense of satisfaction, mentally violating moral norms. In virtual reality, there is no scale of human feelings: killing and suppressing a child does not experience ordinary human emotions: pain, sympathy, empathy. On the contrary, the usual feelings are distorted here, instead of them the child gets pleasure from the blow and insult and his own permissiveness.

-Aggression in cartoons is accompanied by beautiful, bright pictures. The heroes are beautifully dressed, or they are in a beautiful room, or a beautiful scene is simply drawn, which is accompanied by murder, a fight, and other aggressive behavior patterns, this is done in order for the cartoon to attract. Because if, on the basis of already existing ideas about beauty, we pour in pictures of sadism, then the already established ideas are blurred. Thus, aesthetic perception, a new culture of a person is formed. And children already want to watch these cartoons and films, and they are already perceived by them as the norm. Children are drawn to them, and do not understand why adults with traditional ideas about beauty, about the norm, do not want to show them to them.

- Often the characters of Western cartoons are ugly and outwardly disgusting. What is it for? The point is that the child identifies himself not only with the character's behavior. The mechanisms of imitation in children are reflexive and so subtle that they can catch the slightest emotional changes, the smallest facial expressions. Monsters are evil, stupid, insane. And he identifies himself with such characters, children correlate their feelings with the expression of their faces. And they begin to conduct accordingly: it is impossible to adopt evil facial expressions and remain kind-hearted in soul, adopt a senseless grin and strive to "gnaw the granite of science", as in the program "Sesame Street"

- The atmosphere of the video market is permeated with murderers, rapists, sorcerers, and other characters, communication with whom you would never choose in real life. And children see all this on TV screens. In children, the subconscious is not yet protected by common sense and life experience, which makes it possible to distinguish between the real and the conventional. For a child, everything he sees is a reality that captures for life. The TV screen with the violence of the adult world has replaced grandmothers and mothers, reading, familiarizing with the true culture. Hence the growth of emotional and mental disorders, depression, teenage suicide, unmotivated cruelty in children.

- The main danger of television is associated with the suppression of will and consciousness, similar to what is achieved by drugs. American psychologist A. Mori writes that prolonged contemplation of the material, tired eyes, produces hypnotic torpor, which is accompanied by a weakening of will and attention. With a certain duration of exposure, light flashes, flickering and a certain rhythm begin to interact with the brain's alpha rhythms, on which the ability to concentrate depends, and disorganize the cerebral rhythm and develop attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

- The flow of visual and auditory information, which does not require concentration and mental effort, is perceived passively. Over time, this is transferred to real life, and the child begins to perceive it in the same way. And it is more and more difficult to concentrate on the task, to make a mental or volitional effort. The child gets used to doing only what does not require effort. The child is difficult to turn on in the classroom, it is difficult to perceive educational information. And without active mental activity, the development of nerve connections, memory, associations does not take place.

- The computer and the TV take away their childhood from the children. Instead of active games, experiencing real emotions and feelings and communicating with peers and parents, knowing oneself through the living world around them, children spend hours, and sometimes days and nights at the TV and computer, depriving themselves of the opportunity for development that is given to a person only in childhood.