The Sydney Morning Herald quotes R Power, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Macquarie University as saying, “If there was no relationship between what is modelled on the screen and the behaviour of people, we would not have advertising campaigns.” He says television is teaching people, “mostly men, that violence is a solution.”
Professor Kenneth Hirsch from California State University said his studies had found, “children who took a long time [differentiating] between real and make-believe TV images would often end up in institutions.” Prof Hirsch has compiled data from as far back as 1968 and has documented “at lease three consequences that have been empirically (based on scientific fact, not on theory) linked to viewing media violence.” They are, “violent behaviour, distorted perceptions of reality and a tolerance of real-life aggressive behaviours.”
Prof Anne Albright from the University of Pennsylvania says, “research proved children who watch a lot of violence on TV were more likely to become criminals that those who were protected from violent images on the screen.”
The Washington Post published “Primal Screen, Kids: TV, Violence and Real-Life Behaviour” in April 1992 and looked at a 24-year-long television-violence research project at the University of Illinois. They found “the continued viewing of television violence by children can have a lasting effect on their character and personality, leading to serious criminal behaviour and antisocial violence of all types.” The researchers, Psychologists Leonard Eron and Rowell Huesmann, stated “the best single predictor we have as to how aggressive a young person would be at age 19 is the violence of the television programs that he preferred when he was eight years old.”
Internationally respected researcher George Gerbner’s studies at the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated that the more time a child spends living in the world of television violence, the more he or she tends to give a distorted, “television answer” in response to questions about life events.
A perfect example of this “television answer” is a recent study of adolescents in Vancouver Canada. They were asked about their perceptions of police behaviour. The Vancouver Police Department, parenthetically, is one of the least violent in the world and did not fire a single shot at, much less wound or kill anyone, during the period studied. The adolescents who were the heaviest viewers of television reported the Vancouver Police to have killed and wounded numerous people, innocent bystanders as well as criminals. This study is a powerful illustration of the phenomenon of the “television answer”.