Tv Violence Essay Research Paper Violence on

Tv Violence Essay, Research Paper

Violence on Tv

Most people in our society generally have the opinion that violence on television

increases aggression in children and adolescents. Does it . Who is to say whether

television has a positively direct effect or a positive correlation . However, the majority

of the people who have researched this topic have discovered that violence on television

is indeed one of the prime factors contributing to the increase in violent and aggressive

behavior among the youth in society. That is to say “there has been a growth of strong

evidence to suggest that television violence does play an important and contributory part

in the learning of aggression.” In other words, violence in the media helps promote and

encourage children and adolescents to freely express their abusive behavior. As a result,

the topic of my essay will help support the issue that violence in the media causes

abusive behavior in youths. Furthermore, I will emphasize if their are any differences in

aggressive behavior between the genders.

By nature when babies first begin to learn, they do so by imitating other people’s

behaviors. That is to say, “children are born ready to imitate adult behavior” because

“much of human behavior is learned by observing another person’s behavior and, in some

cases, imitating it.” One of the first imitation of a newborn baby is the imitation of adults’

facial movements. For example, in the book Infant and Child, by Judith Rich Harris and

Robert M. Liebert, “it shows a baby girl only six days old sticking out her tongue in

imitation of her mother’s actions.” This clearly shows that from the moment a child is

born, he or she is already learning from observing. Therefore, as the child grows up and

starts watching television, the child can not distinguish between what is reality and what

is fantasy. “In the minds of young children, television is a source of entirely factual

information regarding how the world works.” For instance, as a child I could remember

imitating violent acts after watching violent movies such as Superman, Star Wars, Star

Trek, and Rocky. It felt fun to imitate these so called heroes because it seemed like the

characters in the movies were invincible. Moreover, the main characters in the movies

were always liked and respected.

There are many other examples that confirm that people imitate violence scenes

on television. For instance, the cartoon Beavis and Butthead on MTV in the United States

was widely criticized for depicting the cartoon characters shaped like cigarettes. The

cartoon also gained national attention when a young five year old fan from the United

States set fire to his house after watching the show. This was due to the fact that in one of

the episodes, Beavis and Butthead were going around setting fires to houses.

Furthermore, in a resent incident in Norway, two children beat another child by

jumping and kicking the child in the head and other parts of her body numerous times. As

a result, the child died from being left out in the cold because she was not able to move

due to her injuries. Later the officials had discovered that the barbaric incident was due

to the fact that the children had watched the violent cartoon Mighty Morphin Power

Rangers. The children thought that the girl would later get up because in the show the

characters never die. Consequently, the show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was

canceled throughout Norway. In addition, YTV, a youth cable channel in Canada and

also other television networks has recently canceled the show because it did not meet

their standards.

Children are not the only ones who get influenced by violence in the media. Many times

adolescents and young adults also mimic violence portrayed in the media. In another

recent incident in the United States, a young man after seeing the movie Natural Born

Killer starring Woody Harrelson shaved his head to look like the main character and shot

his parents. This definitely proves that children are not the only ones who try to imitate

violent behaviors.

Many studies have been conducted to determine if in fact people imitate or model

aggressive behaviors. For example, one of the most well know studies of modeling

aggressive behavior and to determine if children imitate violent acts observed on

television is an experiment done by Albert Bandura, Dorothea Ross and Sheila A. Ross.

To test their hypothesis, the subjects were divided into three experimental groups and one

control group. One group observed real-life aggression, the second group observed the

same models but on film and the third group watched an aggressive cartoon. The groups

were also subdivided into male and female subjects so that half the subjects were

exposed to the same sex models, while the other half viewed model of the opposite sex.

After the subjects were exposed to aggression, they were tested for

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