Put down the TV and step away from the gun
TV watching correlated with commission of violence
45 per cent of the men who had watched three hours or more at age 14 went on to commit an aggressive act against another person, compared to just nine per cent of the men who had spent less than an hour in front of the tube. Over 20 per cent of the three-hour-a day group went on to commit robbery, threaten to injure someone or use a weapon to commit a crime.
For women aged 30, the strongest TV predictor of violence was watching three hours of more at age 22. Of these women, 17 per cent had committed an aggressive act, compared to none in the group watching less than an hour a day.
Beliefs on this have seemed to be split pretty firmly on party lines, with conservatives insisting that watching violent TV (the study above didn't account for what was being watched, just how much) begat violence and liberals insisting that was nonsense. It has struck me that liberals clung to that position so stubbornly because they were convinced that if they gave any credence to TV having any effect, they would be somehow granting tacit approval to censorship.
I always found claiming that TV has no effect to be silly. If something that so many people are doing for 25% or more of their waking hours has no effect on them, then what, in principle, could? And, I'm a free-speech fanatic, who would oppose any attempt to censor the violence on TV. And I think that people watch far too much TV, and there's too much violence on it, and would endorse both people turning the damn thing off, and TV programmers coming up with better content.
I think wanting to legislate all of one's opinions about what would make people happier or the world better, forcing everyone to follow them, is one of the great malaises of our modern society. And that assuming other people hold that belief, and so any beliefs they have about what would make the world better represent what they would want everyone forced to do is another.
And jeez, what're those egghead scientists going to come up with next? That advertising promotes dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and people buying things they don't really need, or something?
Amen to that. I think the reason that i dont want to "give credence to it's effect.." is that it scares hell out of me thinking that people could actually be stupid enough to be affected by the crap on tv. Saints preserve us! TV made me do it as a legit social excuse!?
Posted by DeadmanGuru on April 1 2002 06:00
Another prominent entry on my 'great malaise of our society' list is the conflation of causality and culpability... wanting to not even talk about contributing factors to behaviors, whether genetic, nutritional, drugs, childhood environment, for fear that any attribution of a causal effect then justifies the behavior, making all wrongdoers innocent. All actions, it seems, need to be viewed as pure and wholly independent acts of free will, entirely disconnected from all prior events and conditions, or suddenly no one is responsible for anything.
A prominent recent example of this is how impossible it is to criticize the recent history of US foreign policy in the mid-East without being told that one as acting as an apologist for Al Qaeda and asserting that 9/11 was justified. Or, my favorite, that one is patronizingly robbing them of free will by suggesting that their actions had anything to do with anything else in the world.
There are uncountable contributing factors to everything we think, everything we choose. And we're still responsible for our actions. These are not contradictory.
Posted by Zed on April 1 2002 08:28