Violence and sexuality in the media

Type of psychology: Social psychology

The American mass media, especially films and television, contain high levels of violence. In some pornography, violence is presented in a sexual context. The consensus among social scientists, based on both laboratory experiments and field studies, is that nonsexual and sexual violence causes aggressive behavior in the audience but that nonviolent pornography does not..

Introduction

The world of the American mass media tends to be more violent than the real world. Communication researcher George Gerbner found that approximately 80 percent of television programs contain some violence, for an average of almost ten violent acts per hour. Other studies on the subject range from 57 percent to 91 percent of TV shows containing some form of violence. Some prime-time television programs and R-rated action films contain as many as 50 to 150 violent acts per hour. Cartoons average 25 violent acts per hour. In the 2010s and 2020s, smartphones, mobiles devices, and video games have increased the frequency to which people are exposed to violence in media. It has been estimated that by the age of eighteen, the average American has witnessed 100,000 acts of violence, including 25,000 killings, on television alone. There are many cases of direct copying of media violence. For example, at least twenty-eight people have killed themselves in apparent imitation of the Russian roulette scene in the film The Deer Hunter (1978). Reactions to such anecdotal evidence, however, must be tempered by the knowledge that many millions of people have seen these programs and films.

In the early 1960s, psychologist Leonard Berkowitz devised a laboratory procedure to study the effects of filmed violence on aggressive behavior. In a typical experiment, subjects are made angry by a confederate or accomplice of the experimenter. They then watch a ten-minute film clip containing a high level of violence (a boxing match) or an equally exciting control film (a foot race). Finally, subjects are permitted to evaluate the confederate’s work using an “aggression machine,” an apparatus that they think delivers electric shocks to the confederate. Results of these studies consistently show that subjects who have seen a violent film deliver longer and more intense shocks than control subjects do. This experiment has been repeated at least 150 times with the same results, making its findings among the most reliable in social psychology. Similar effects have been found with other measures of verbal and physical aggression.

Four variables have been shown to influence the amount of imitation of media violence. First, the more realistic the portrayal of violence, the greater the imitation. The same violence is more effective when presented as a real event than as fiction. “Aggression cues,” or points of similarity between the filmed violence and the subject’s real-life experience, such as a weapon or a character’s name, can increase aggression. Second, more imitation occurs when violence is presented as justified. Violence committed by the hero in revenge for previous harm produces greater imitation than violence that is unfair to the victim. Third, imitation increases when violence is effective—that is, when aggressors are rewarded with wealth, happiness, and social approval. Fourth, imitation is more likely when the viewer is in a psychological state of readiness to aggress—for example, when he or she is emotionally aroused or angry. Anger, however, is not a necessary condition for imitation of violence.

Critics have argued that laboratory studies of aggression are so different from everyday experience that the results are not generalizable to the real world. This skepticism produced a second generation of studies using field-research methodologies. These included correlational studies in which subjects’ exposure to violent programs was related to ratings of their aggressiveness by parents, teachers, or peers; field studies in which the exposure of institutionalized boys to media violence was controlled and physical and verbal aggression was observed; “natural experiments” in which communities or nations that were slow to receive television were compared with others that received it sooner; and archival studies of the effects of highly publicized suicides or homicides on the suicide or homicide rate. Although the results of these studies are not as clear as those of laboratory experiments, they have generally supported the hypothesis.

In summary, there is substantial evidence from studies using a variety of research methods converging on the conclusion that filmed and televised violence increases aggression. Although any single study can be criticized on methodological grounds, there are no convincing alternative explanations for all of them.

Media violence can affect attitudes as well as behavior. The prevalence of crime and violence on television appears to cultivate a “mean world syndrome.” For example, heavy viewers are more likely than infrequent viewers to overestimate the frequency of crime. It is not clear, however, whether television causes these attitudes or pessimistic and fearful people are more attracted to television.

Pornography Effects

Laboratory research on the effects of pornography has used procedures similar to those of aggression research. In several studies, male subjects were angered by a female confederate. They watched either violent pornography (a sexually explicit rape scene) or a control film. The men who saw the rape film showed more violence against women than did control subjects. Violent pornography, however, contains two distinct variables that might plausibly be related to aggression: violence and sexual explicitness. To determine whether either or both contribute to aggression, it is necessary to compare four conditions: sex plus violence (a sexually explicit rape scene), violence only (a nonexplicit rape scene), sex only (sexually explicit but with willing participants), and a control film. Researchers who have made this comparison find that the sex-plus-violence and violence-only conditions increase aggression toward women (to about the same degree), but nonviolent pornography does not usually produce any more aggression than a control film. This suggests that the effect of violent pornography is a special case of the well-established effect of filmed violence. Nonviolent pornography does not increase aggression. This is important, because only a small percentage of pornography—for example, about 15 percent of pornography films—contains violence.

Studies show that men exposed to violent (and, in some cases, nonviolent) pornography in laboratory experiments show undesirable changes in attitude. They are more likely to endorse rape myths, such as the belief that women secretly enjoy being raped. They recommend less severe punishment for the defendant in a hypothetical rape trial, suggesting that they regard rape as a less serious crime. There is no evidence, however, that these attitudes are directly related to the likelihood of raping someone. It should be noted that these attitude changes are small and temporary and that similar effects have been obtained with nonpornographic violence, such as R-rated “mad slasher” films.

Field research on the effects of pornography falls into two categories. Some researchers have examined the relationship between the availability of pornography and the incidence of reported rape in various locales. Others have interviewed convicted sex offenders to see whether they differ from nonoffenders in their history of exposure to pornography. Both approaches have produced mixed results, suggesting that, at most, pornography plays a minor role in sexual assault once alternative explanations have been removed.

An Ongoing Debate

The effects of media violence have been vigorously debated for several decades. Televised violence is of special concern because of its vivid and realistic nature and its easy accessibility to children. The most extensive government investigation of the effects of television on children was the 1972 Surgeon General’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior, which conducted forty scientific studies. It concluded that television can cause aggression, but the committee’s report contained so many qualifications that it was widely perceived as indicating that television is not really an important cause of aggressive behavior. This ambiguity may have resulted from the fact that the television networks were allowed to appoint five of the twelve commissioners and to blackball several proposed members. A 1982 update by the National Institute of Mental Health stated more directly that television violence is indeed a cause of aggression. In spite of these investigations and the lobbying of pressure groups such as Action for Children’s Television, the amount of violence on television has only increased. The television networks believe (with some justification) that violent programs are more popular, and they have considerable power to resist governmental regulation.

Pornography in all media, from print to film to the Internet, has also been an issue of great concern to the American public. The country’s ambivalence about media sexuality is illustrated by the contrasting recommendations of two government commissions. The 1970 Commission on Obscenity and Pornography consisted primarily of social scientists. It funded nineteen original studies (all of nonviolent pornography) and concluded that pornography had no proven harmful effects. Political reaction to the report was primarily negative. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan appointed the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography (the Meese Commission), consisting primarily of antipornography activists with little social scientific background. The Meese Commission came to the following conclusions: Violent pornography causes aggression toward women and harmful attitude change; nonviolent pornography that is degrading to women (although the report was not very clear about what “degrading” means) does not cause aggressive behavior but produces harmful attitude change; and nonviolent and nondegrading pornography has no specific negative effects, although certain moral and aesthetic harms were claimed. In spite of the different effects attributed to each type, the commission concluded that all pornography should be banned and proposed ninety-two recommendations for doing so. Social scientists criticized the Meese Commission for failing to define categories of pornography clearly, for biased selection and presentation of research, for not distinguishing between low- and high-quality evidence, and for obscuring differences between the effects of violent and nonviolent pornography.

Attempts to regulate media violence and pornography would appear to be in conflict with the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The courts have historically permitted many exceptions to the First Amendment, however, and there is a long history of legal censorship of news and entertainment media. Social scientists disagree on whether there is enough evidence of antisocial effects of violence or pornography to justify censorship. Many social scientists would insist, however, that the Constitution places a strong burden of proof on the censor, that a much stronger case could be made for censorship of violence (including violent pornography) than of nonviolent pornography, and that attempts to censor media content because it is alleged to produce “bad attitudes” are in conflict with the free marketplace of ideas model assumed by the Constitution.

While social scientists see media violence as more harmful than pornography, the American public favors censorship of nonviolent pornography more than of violence. This suggests that people underestimate the effects of media violence, overestimate the effects of nonviolent pornography, or object to pornography for reasons other than its alleged harmful effects.

Psychological Models

Two early psychological approaches to the study of aggression made different predictions about the effects of media violence. Instinct and drive theories of aggression suggested that watching media violence would provide a catharsis, or release of aggressive energy, which would reduce the likelihood of subsequent aggression. Social learning theory proposed that much of one’s knowledge of how to behave comes from observing and sometimes imitating the behavior of others. Exposure to media violence would be expected to increase aggression. The majority of research has supported the social learning theory position.

There are several contemporary explanations for the effects of media violence. The imitation approach emphasizes the direct transmission of information about when, why, and how to commit aggressive behaviors. This theory accounts for copycat aggression but has difficulty explaining more general effects. The disinhibition approach points out that adults already know how to aggress, and that media violence reduces restraints that would normally cause people to inhibit their aggressive impulses by suggesting that aggression is socially acceptable. The arousal and desensitization approaches suggest that watching violence will have different short- and long-term effects. In the short run, violence is exciting and increases physiological arousal, which can spill over and energize real aggressive behavior. This effect would appear to be temporary. In the long run, each exposure produces progressively less arousal, called desensitization. This implies that a steady diet of media violence can make people indifferent to the pain and suffering of victims and increase their tolerance of real violence.

In the 1970s and 1980s, cognitive theories became more popular in psychology. The cognitive priming approach proposes that media violence increases the availability of aggressive thoughts in the viewer for as long as several days, and these thoughts increase the probability of aggressive behavior. A related approach suggests that media portrayals contribute to the formation and maintenance of aggressive behavioral scripts, which are later activated by real situations similar to those observed in the media.

The effects of violent pornography can be explained by the same theories that explain the effects of general film violence. Those who claim that nonviolent pornography causes aggression are faced with the problem of explaining how nonaggressive content (sexuality) can activate aggressive behavior. A variation on arousal theory, the excitation transfer theory, suggests that the physiological arousal caused by pornography can subsequently be confused with anger and can energize aggression. Any source of arousal, such as music or exercise, can have this effect if the timing is right. This theory predicts very subtle, temporary effects of exposure to pornography, and, as noted, research does not consistently support it.

Effects of aggression and pornography on attitudes can be explained on the basis of theories of attitude change, which show that, not surprisingly, almost any media presentation produces small, temporary changes of attitude in the direction advocated by its author. Resistance to attitude change occurs when the audience has the information and the motivation to argue with the media effectively.

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