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Originally Posted by Mat Sklansky
3 questions that may or may not be appropriate here.
violence on tv. cartoons movies video games...
Since I may not be able to do some really deep dive on these (or at least not real soon), I figured I'd say a few things. Usually people are asking about whether there's a causal relationship, e.g. does violence in media cause violent behavior. So I assume that's the topic you're asking about. I feel like I've read studies that claim to identify a causal relationship between exposure to violent media and violent behavior, and other studies which claim not to find any. I don't actually know the correct answer. I do know that establishing causality is probably really difficult, and will likely run both ways in a feedback loop. That is, I would guess the most important factor in explaining the existence of violence in media is just that humans are violent. But it also makes sense that violent media contributes in some small way to reinforcing those violent tendencies. But it might only be a small way.
There seems to be a lot of research which focuses on establishing "desensitization" to violence as a result of exposure to violent media, probably because it's easier and more direct to measure changes in people's reactions than changes in their behavior. So for example,
The Longitudinal Relationship Between Media Violence and Empathy: Was It Sympathy All Along? investigates "desensitization" in terms of reductions in people's empathy and sympathy for others. The authors are specifically trying to disentangle the concepts of "sympathy" and "empathy" but the literature review is also helpful, and I'm not sure we care about that level of detail here.
Re: causality, the authors say:
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numerous cross-sectional, experimental, and longitudinal studies have provided empirical evidence linking violent media consumption with subsequent aggressive behavior (Anderson et al., 2010; for contrary results, see Ferguson & Kilburn, 2009; Greitemeyer & Mugge, 2014; Paik & Comstock, 1994). Yet, the effects of media violence are not solely relegated to aggressive behavior. Indeed, researchers agree that media violence is also likely to influence other behavioral and social–emotional outcomes, some of which may even be the underlying mechanism between violent media and aggressive behavior (Anderson & Bushman, 2002; Carnagey, Anderson, & Bushman, 2007).
My takeaway is that the causality is pretty complicated (duh?), and it's also noteworthy that the correlation found between exposure to media violence and a reduction in sympathy for others in this study is fairly weak (p. 186). The correlation also seems to depend on measuring something pretty specific, e.g. the other measures of empathy they examined showed no correlation at all.
So what's the upshot of all this? I'm not really sure. I also wonder about how one measures the level of violence in media, because it could get fairly abstract. Does the level of realism matter? I often feel that more contemporary TV and movies are a little too violent for my sensibilities, but then I regularly play a video game that is violent, but the violence is more cartoonish and to me the lack of realism makes it feel more abstract, in the same way that I wouldn't think of chess as violent although it simulates battle in some very abstract way. I tend to be skeptical of political interventions aimed at reducing media violence to some extent because of all these questions I have. At the same time, I also lament how violent we are, and wish we could be less so. But I don't know how useful political interventions can be.