Psychological explanations for media influences on anti-social behaviour

Psychological explanations for media influences on anti-social behaviour

1. Observational learning and imitation, Children observe the actions of media models and may later imitate these behaviours, especially if the violent behaviour is successful in gaining the models objectives

   • Bandura's research supports the view that children learn specific acts of aggression and increased aggressiveness through imitating models
   • The two boys who murdered James Bulger were said to be inspired by the video Child's Play
   • There is not a lot o supporting evidence for this outside of Bandura's research with specifically prepared videos

2. Cognitive Priming, Immediately after a violent programme, the viewer is primed to respond aggressively because a network of memories involving aggression is retrieved

   • Josephson (1987) hockey players behaved more aggressively after watching a violent video, the use of a walkie-talie in the video also acted as a cue for aggression

3. Desensitisation, Media violence may stimulate aggressive behaviour by desensitising children to the effects of violence. The more televised violence a child watches the more acceptable aggressive behaviour becomes

   • Cumberbatch argues that people might get used to screen violence but this does not mean a person will also get used to violence in the real world

4. Lowered physiological arousal, The arousal stimulated by viewing violence is unpleasant a first but children who constantly view watch violent television become used to it and their emotional and physiological response declines

   • Zillman suggested that the excitation-transfer model suggests that arousal creates a readiness to aggress if there are appropriate circumstances
   • Feshbach and Singer believe that watching violence has beneficial cathartic effect - arousal allows one release of pent-up aggressive energies
   • Large scale studies have found that there are stronger desensitisation effects for males than for females

5. Justification, violent behaviours on television may provide a justification for a child's own violent behaviour, or they may provide moral guidelines concerning what is acceptable and unacceptable

   • many tv programmes have mixed prosocial and antisocial messages e.g good guys behaving violently
   • Liss and Reinhardt suggest that negative effects of such programmes support the concept of justification
   • The use of aggression by prosocial characters lends an aura of moral justification