It’s been debated, essentially, since the beginning of cinema whether or not violence in movies are a detriment to a society, and ultimately a cause for people to become violent themselves. We’ve all seen movies like this – A Clockwork Orange, Saw, most of the horror movies we find on Netflix in the middle of night…
This is something that fascinates me, so I saw what I could find on the subject. What I did find was a study conducted by Virginia Tech University, in which a group of student volunteers (53 male and 40 female) watched a film a night for five nights. Certain students were showed movies in which conflicts are resolved non-violently, and others films containing gratuitous scenes of violence. The students were told by the facilitators of the study that the study was aimed to gauge the marketability of certain films containing high levels of violence.
For the second part of the study, the administrators of the study once again misled the students, this time telling them that they’d be assessed in performing tasks that “would indicate whether they possessed important interaction skills or lacked them.” The experimenters would react with extreme dissapproval and outright criticism with the students who had viewed non-violent films, and with non-confrontational tactics with those who had viewed violent ones. The students were then called to a professor’s office and asked if they thought the experimenters should receive financial aid or be denied of it. The experiment found that each student who had been provoked reacted hostilely toward the facilitators when asked this question, regardless of the types of films they were shown. However, students who weren’t provoked, but had seen violent films, reacted just as hostilely as those who had been provoked by the facilitator of the study.
Of course, confounding variables come into play here too. For instance, female students were generally more aggressive, and the experimenters in the study were exclusively female, so the lack of male aggression could be chalked up to chivalry. In participants with Type A personalities (which are consistent with fierce competitiveness and self criticism, as well as well as time urgency) aggression was also more common. which could be attributed to annoyance with the quick transition from film-viewing to test taking.
There are obvious holes in the details of the work done in the study (the presence of all-female experimenters, the short time period of only 5 nights viewing the films) but do you think that that this is an accurate representation, or that the study would benefit from a more ongoing approach? Also: is it enough to gauge just aggression after watching violent films, and not actual acts of violence? Feel free to share any thoughts.
This is an interesting subject to analyze, and if I would’ve known there was substantial research out there, I might have tried to beat you to it. However, you did it very well…I’m glad I didn’t, as I couldn’t have done it better than you did. Your writing and reference to various movies at the beginning of the blog kept my attention until the end-This allowed you to establish your point and effectively analyze the mentioned experiment. This leads me to another aspect of your blog I enjoyed- the analysis of the study. Rather than just restating to us what occurred in the experiment and what the results were, you gave your own input on the study, utilizing what we’ve learned in class. You also presented some potential issues with the integrity of its findings. And, to conclude brilliantly, you opened the door to our comments. Knowing this is a necessity for our blogging grade, you let your post flow seamlessly into our responses, collaterally giving us a lot of opportunities for further analysis.
Answering your question- no. I don’t think this was an accurate study. Whether its findings agreed with what I would predict or not, I don’t think the study was conducted well enough to actually determine the effect of violent movies. Analyzing and expanding on some of your contentions of the issues: the study was too small. We’re talking about effects on most individuals. We’re talking about effects on individuals within the entire population. In this experiment, less than one hundred were utilized. Obviously, experiments have a certain range in which they cannot operate beyond…but just one hundred? That’s my first issue. My second also arises with quantities in the experiment. Only five nights worth of movies? This is absolutely minimal in the broad scheme of “violent movies” and testing whether or not they effect violent personalities. It obviously should have been a longer run experiment also-atleast for a month or so. If it supposedly takes more than 21 days to develop a habit, it’ll certainly take more than 21 days to change a personality with cinema. The fallacies of the experiment could be elaborated on for an extended amount of time… just like with any experiment.
As an avid movie buff, this is definitely something I will look more into. One of the first articles I found in exploring more can be located here. All in all, the blog post was great. It got me thinking and really has made me not just more curious into the topic, but into how experiments are run (like we’re learning in class).
I personally love reading studies such as these. I was told my whole childhood not to watch violent movies because it would make me violent. It never made much sense to me. Thankfully there is research such as this, proving otherwise. I am curious though, is the same thing true with video games or violent music? This question has also always intrigued me!