Taking Psychology with You

Does Media Violence Make You Violent?

In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a 2005 California law that had banned shops from selling or renting violent video games to anyone under age 18. California argued that violence is as obscene as pornography, and if selling or renting porn to young people is illegal, surely selling or renting violent video games should be prohibited as well. The court thought otherwise, ruling that not only are violent video games not obscene, but many parents think they are harmless fun. Just look at what happens to Hansel and Gretel, or Cinderella, said one of the justices; “Grimm's Fairy Tales,” he wrote, “are grim indeed.” But other countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, and England, have concluded that violent video games can be dangerous enough to children to justify restrictions or even a complete ban. Which conclusion is right? Does violence depicted in films, on TV, and in video games lead to real violence?

Psychologists are strongly divided in their answers to this question. One group of investigators concluded, “Research on violent television and films, video games, and music reveals unequivocal evidence that media violence increases the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior,” both in the short term and long term (Anderson et al., 2003). Their meta-analyses find that the greater the exposure to violence in movies and on television, the stronger the likelihood of a person's behaving aggressively, and this correlation holds for both sexes and across cultures, from Japan to England (Anderson et al., 2010). Video games that directly reward violence, as by awarding points or moving the player to the next level after a “kill,” increase feelings of hostility, aggressive thinking, and aggressive behavior (Carnagey & Anderson, 2005). Moreover, when grade school children cut back on time spent watching TV or playing violent video games, the children's aggressiveness declines (Robinson et al., 2001).

Violent media may also desensitize people to the pain or distress of others. In a field study, people who had just seen a violent movie took longer to come to the aid of a woman struggling to pick up her crutches than did people who had seen a nonviolent movie or people still waiting to see one of the two movies (Bushman & Anderson, 2009).

However, an opposing group of psychologists believes that the effects of video games have been exaggerated and sensationalized (Ferguson, 2013; Ferguson & Kilburn, 2010). The correlation between playing violent video games and behaving aggressively, they maintain, is too small to worry about (Ferguson, 2007; Sherry, 2001). Other factors that are correlated with violent criminality are far more powerful; they include genetic influences (.75), perceptions of criminal opportunity (.58), owning a gun (.35), poverty (.25), and childhood physical abuse (.22). In their calculations, watching violent video games has the lowest correlation, only .04 (Ferguson, 2009; Ferguson & Kilburn, 2010). Besides, they observe, rates of teenage violence declined significantly throughout the 1990s, a period in which the number of violent video games was increasing astronomically.

In the social-cognitive view, both conclusions about the relationship of media violence to violent behavior have merit. Repeated acts of aggression in the media do model behavior and responses to conflict that a few people may imitate, just as media ads influence what many people buy and what many people think the ideal male or female body should look like. However, children watch many different programs and movies and have many models to observe besides those they see in the media, including parents and peers. For every teenager who is obsessed with playing a video game that involves grim fantasies of blowing up the world, hundreds more think the game is just plain fun and then go off to do their homework.

Moreover, perceptions and interpretations of events, personality dispositions such as aggressiveness and sociability, and the social context in which the violence is viewed can all affect how a person responds (Feshbach & Tangney, 2008). One person may learn from seeing people being blown away in a film that violence is cool and masculine; another may decide that the violent images are ugly and stupid; a third may conclude that they don't mean anything at all, that they are just part of the story.

What should be done, if anything, about media violence? Even if only a small percentage of viewers learn to be aggressive from observing all that violence, the social consequences can be serious because the total audiences for TV, movies, and video games are immense. But censorship, which some people think is the answer, brings its own set of problems, quite apart from constitutional issues of free speech. Should we ban Hamlet? Bloody graphic comics? Films that truthfully depict the realities of war, murder, and torture?

Consider, too, that it's not just video games and other visual media that can increase aggression. In two studies, students read a violent passage from the Bible, with two sentences inserted in which God sanctions the violence. Later, in what they thought was a different study, they played a competitive reaction-time game with a partner. In the game, they were more willing to blast their competitor with a loud noise than were students who had been told the violent passage was from an ancient scroll or students who had read a passage that did not mention God (Bushman et al., 2007). Participants who believed in God were most affected by the passage in which God condones the violence, but many nonbelievers were affected too. Although the general message of the scriptures is one of peace and reconciliation, the Bible is also full of violence, some of it sanctioned by God. Yet few people would be willing to ban the Bible or censure its violent parts.

As you can see, determining a fair and equitable policy regarding media violence will not be easy. It will demand good evidence—and good thinking.