Televised Violence & Real World Violence

Many of the studies on the link between television violence and aggressive tendencies have been flawed by design, thus making the data obtained subject to attack. The television industry has taken a defensive stance against most endeavors to link societal violence to TV viewing because violent shows have traditionally attracted viewers. The industry has stayed in the forefront of the issue by denying the connection between its programming and crimes of aggression, mostly on grounds that a direct cause and effect relationship cannot be assumed. Here, we return to the fact that many studies are correlational ("TV viewing accompanies aggressive behavior") but fail to demonstrate a causal relationship ("TV viewing causes aggression"). Because of the infinite number of variables at work in the social environment, a direct cause and effect relationship between TV violence and aggression is difficult to prove.

Those not willing to concede a causal relationship between viole

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(127128). In Light's survey of one week, a person could watch twelve murders, four attempted suicides, several raving psychotics, two cars running over cliffs, a horse grinding a man under its hooves, and one stabbing in the back with a butcher knife. The list continues through fifteen more examples. Light cites the work of two Harvard scholars who explain the problem of objectifying the effects of TV violence: studies that try to measure very shortterm effects (i.e., watching certain programs for a week or two) on behavior that is hard to observe (aggression) are inevitably going to produce modest findings surrounded by many qualifications. (128) In laboratory experiments, aggression (fake "shocks" or hitting toy dolls) is tested under conditions where the experimental design may foster aggression because the subject knows that "this is only an experiment," and the subject may feel that the experimenter expects or even wants an aggressive response (166167). A much less artificial measurement of the effects of video violence was offered by Jerome Singer and Dorothy Singer of Yale University. During a study in 1979, Singer and Singer observed 141 preschoolers at play. During that period, the parents kept a rec
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1738
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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