The Effects of Media Violence on Increased Aggression in Society Today
Beavis and Butthead, MTV cartoon characters, discuss how much fun it is to set fires. On one occasion, one of them lights a fire in the other’s hair by using aerosol spray cans and matches.
Later, 5-year-old Austin Messner, who had watched the cartoon, sets his bed on fire with a cigarette lighter. Although he and his mother escape the subsequent blaze, his younger sister dies (Feldman, 1997, p. 179).
An 18-year-old boy locks himself in his room, mesmerized for hours by the corpse-filled video game Doom, while shock-rocker Marilyn Manson screams obscenities from the stereo. Shelved nearby are a video collection, including the graphically violent film Natural Born Killers, and a diary, replicating the unrestrained expressions of hate and death, published on the boy’s personal website. Should this boy’s media preferences be cause for alarm?
On April 20, 1999 there was a massacre of 12 students and a teacher by fellow Columbine High School students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The Littleton, Colorado teenagers reportedly immersed themselves in the same media described above, even producing and starring in their own murderous video before gunning down their classmates, and apparently taking their own lives. (Does Violence on Televisio…, n.d.).
Parents of the victims linked gothic punk rocker Marilyn Manson to the incident. They argued Mason’s (1996) Antichrist Superstar album, along with other forms of violent media, inspired the perpetrators (“forger God,” 1999) (Dowd, Singer, and Wilson, 2006, p.179).
We live in a world in which aggression is prevalent and we need look no further than in our daily newspapers or the nightly news to be bombarded with examples of aggression, both on a societal level: war, invasion, and assassination, and on an individual level: crime, child abuse, and many petty cruelties humans are capable of inflicting on one another.
What is aggression? According to psychologists aggression is behaviour intended towards the goal of harming another person, who is motivated to avoid such treatment (Baron, Byrne, & Branscombe, 2006. p. 419; Feldman, 1997, p. 494; Gormly, 1997, p. 243).
The question is do we learn to be aggressive, and does observation of media violence increase aggression in children
This question is not new but the previously mentioned scenarios are among many others which have added urgency to the search for answers. Thus, it is among the most crucial questions being addressed by social psychologists.
The subject is a controversial one which has been extensively researched and vigorously debated in the last few decades. The body of research is quite coherent of demonstrating systematic patterns of influence.
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