ROLE OF MEDIA VIOLENCE IN INFLUENCING BEHAVIOUR
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Netflix, Amazon prime, Hotstar, video games, television and plenty of such platforms has taken a major pie from everyone’s clock, which gives us a reason to consider about its influence on violent behavior of individuals. Violent behavior refers to an act intended to injure or irritate another person. This act could be physical or nonphysical like hurling insults and spreading harmful rumors. We will go about assessing the evidences that lead us to an understanding of how content shown in media affects behavior. This essay will go about discussing short term impact of media violence through various examples and studies conducted in past followed by its long terms impacts on an individual.
Indeed, a person’s susceptibility to incline towards violence is due to multiple factors converging over time but considering present digital era, media violence is a significant contributing factor. Various researches have shown that a significant proportion of aggressive children are likely to grow up to be aggressive adults. A 2002 report by the US Secret Service and the US Department of Education, which investigated 37 cases of targeted school shootings and school attacks from 1974 to 2000 in the country, found that “over half of the attackers have shown some interest in violence through films, video games, books, and other media”.
Generally, media violence can have short or long term effects. To grasp short term effects, experiments have demonstrated that exposing people especially children and youth, to violent behavior on film and television increases the likelihood that they are going to behave aggressively immediately afterwards. Josephson, W.L. conducted an experiment (Josephson, 1987) in which randomly 396 boys of age seven-to nine-year were assigned to watch either a violent or a nonviolent film before they played a game of floor hockey in school. Observers who did not know what film each boy saw reported the amount of times each boy physically attacked another boy during the sport. Physical attack was described as hitting, elbowing, or shoving another player to the ground, as well as tripping, kneeing, and other assaultive actions that would be penalized in hockey. For a few children, the referees carried a walkie-talkie, a specific cue that had existed in the violent film, which was intended to remind the boys of the movie that they had seen earlier. For boys graded as often aggressive by their instructor, the combination of seeing a violent film and seeing the cue associated with the film produced substantially more assaulting actions than any other combination.
Collectively, the studies suggest that news coverage of suicide produces a 2.5% increase in actual suicides. One of the best evidence of a violence effect for news is found in studies of the so-called Marilyn Monroe effect — that highly publicized suicides are followed by a rise in number of suicides among the populace over the course of about two weeks. Interestingly, there have also been reports of two-week duration for the effects of another media process dealing with advertising about violence. This effect can also be understood as Copycat suicides.
Furthermore, estimatedly in 2020, there are 365 million online and offline video gamers in just India alone, with no socioeconomic differences in video game unit ownership. Even among games rated “E” (appropriate for everyone), 64% were found to depict intentional violence as per reports. No published research quantified the violence in mature games graded as “M” — presumably, it is even more likely to be violent. Moreover, because specifically the youngsters playing these games are active participants instead of observers, they may be at increased risk of becoming aggressive themselves. For instance, “Blue Whale Challenge” which first caught news attention in May 2016 in an article by journalist Galina Mursalieva in the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta was a game reportedly consisting of a series of tasks given to players by administrators over a span of 50 days, initially innocuous before introducing elements of self-harm and even the final challenge requiring the player to commit suicide. Though in absence of proofs the truth behind this game remains a mystery if it was true or just another hoax but as children observe violent behavior, they’re prone to imitate it.
Also, mass media (including video games) have created an alarming time displacement effect. It means displacing other activities during which the kid might otherwise would have engaged, which could have changed the risk for certain kinds of behavior, e.g., replacing reading, athletics, etc.
However, Long-term content effects seem to be due to firstly, more lasting observational learning of cognition and behaviors. For instance, extensive observation of violence when is shown to bias children’s world schemas toward attributing hostility to others’ actions. Such attributions successively increase the likelihood of children behaving in aggressive manner. The consequence of repetitive display of violence and crime on media platforms over the years is subconscious accumulation of negativity, which can get triggered by even slightest setback. Though, after just a few exposures, fear, anger, or general arousal can become linked to specific stimuli through classical conditioning.
Secondly, it also causes desensitization of emotional processes. Frequent exposures to emotionally activating media or video games can end up with habituation of certain natural emotional reactions. Behaviors observed by audiences, which may seem odd initially, start to appear more normal after behaviors have been seen over and over because they continue to decrease the severity after several exposures of a specific scene. For instance, most humans tend to have an inherent negative emotional reaction to blood, gore, and violence. Elevated heart rates, sweating, and self-reports of discomfort often accompany such exposure. However, with repeated exposure to violence, this negative emotional response habituates, and therefore the person becomes desensitized.
In a nutshell, the connection between media violence, real-world violence and aggression is moderated by the nature of the media content and characteristics of social influences on the person being exposed to that content. Though there are no concrete conclusive evidences but media violence still tend to possess short and long term impacts. Still, the typical overall size of the effect is large enough to put it within the category of known threats to public health.
