The Debate On Whether Television Makes People Smarter Or Dumber

In 2017, statistics have shown that an average American spent close to four hours per day watching television. Ever since its invention in the 1920s, television (TV) has become one of the most important electronics in Americans households and it emerged into the most popular way for Americans to consume entertainment, overtaking movies and the radio. Our lives depend on TV and statistics have shown that there is an estimated 119.9 million TV households in 2018-2019. The culture of Americans watching TV on the couch for hours right after they got home continued and that problems are arising. For many years, there have been debates on whether or not TV can make us become smarter or dumber individuals. While the debates have not come to an end, those who believe in watching TV can make us smarter claim that watching TV can help develop our critical thinking skills and improve our emotional and social intelligence. On the other hand, those who are against it and believe watching TV can make us dumber claim that its content can encourage antisocial attitudes and destroy our mental ability.

People who believe that watching TV can make us smarter state that television shows can help develop our critical thinking skills. One of their biggest arguments for watching TV is that the action itself does not affect our level of intelligence, but rather, the quality of the shows that were aired determined how intelligence we are. Therefore, there have been various researches showing how different television shows affect our level of intelligence and it is proven oftentimes, that television shows can help our brain to develop more critical thinking skills. According to Steven Johnson, an American popular science author, in his book Everything Bad is Good for you: How Today’s Popular Culture is Making US Smarter, he points out that “over the last half-century, programming on TV has increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. This growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple threading, flashing arrows and social networks”. The growing complexity that Johnson describes was due to the request from audiences. The audiences are demanding more from the shows than ever before which leads to the improvement in the quality of television shows over the past few decades. As people are getting more educated, their demand for more complex content also increased. In order to retain the interest of the audiences, the producers of the shows have to improve the quality by involving multiple threads, more research, and more logic and interactions with the audiences. By doing all these, when the audiences are watching the shows, they need to “pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationship…[they] have to integrate far more information than [they] would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show”. The skills that were required to watch and understand the shows help us develop our critical thinking skills by training us to think deeper and more thoroughly. Therefore, it is safe to say that watching TV can actually help us develop our critical thinking skills.

While people who don’t support the idea of watching TV claims that it can encourage antisocial attitudes, those who support it argue that watching TV can actually improve our emotional and social intelligence, the opposite of antisocial. Emotional and social intelligence is the ability for us to be aware of our and others’ feelings and use that information to lead ourselves and others. Eventually, acquiring this intelligence can help ones to mature in their emotion and their social life. According to a study published in the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, the study shows that watching television shows like sitcoms and dramas can improve ones’ emotional and social intelligence. The study asked a group of participants to watch certain dramas like West Wing, Mad Men, and The Good Wife and another group of participants to watch regular documentaries and compare their emotional and social intelligence afterward through a test. The result turns out that the group of participants who watched dramas “performed significantly higher on the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test.’” The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test is a test of mental state recognition to access the ability to correctly read other people’s emotions by looking at them. By watching dramas that involve complex plots, nuanced and detailed characters that are presented with complicated social and emotional interactions, audiences can learn from those characters and be able to read off others’ minds like how they do with the characters. This social and emotional advancement can help them to interact with others better in the real-world which in hence, enhances their social life.

In contrast, people who don’t think that watching TV can make us smarter state that watching TV will make us dumb when its contents encourage antisocial attitudes. Antisocial attitudes or antisocial behaviors are actions or attitudes that harm others because of the lack of consideration of the well-being of others. People who have antisocial attitudes are mostly self-centered and inconsiderate and therefore often express negative attitudes toward others without consideration or the overall well-being. According to research from Ohio State University, people who watch more TV than others or those who often have their TV on as background noise generally struggle with social interactions with others and they tend to be antisocial. The research was conducted using a group of 107 children between the ages of three to six and they were tested by various tests based on their habit of watching TV like how many hours they watch TV, where their TV is located, and what channels and or television shows they watch. The research reveals that TV can present to children “with unidimensional portraits of characters and situations that lack depth and require only superficial processing to understand' and that “both background television exposure and having a TV in the child's bedroom were significantly and negatively related” The research clearly shows how TV impacts someone’s social mind in which contribute to their antisocial behaviors.

In addition to that, the research also points out that TV and its background noise can cause difficulty in a person’s “Theory of mind” development. “Theory of mind” is the ability for individuals to attributes to their own mental states like beliefs, intents, desires, emotions, and knowledge. Individuals then used those mental states to read through others’ minds so that they can understand that not everyone shares the same feelings and perspectives. “Theory of mind” is a very important process for people, especially children in order for them to mature because this process gives people the capability to empathize and care about the people and things around them. Without “theory of mind”, people would not be able to develop the ability to care and sympathize in which can slowly contribute to a person’s antisocial attitudes. Therefore, watching TV can help contribute to our antisocial attitudes and behaviors and slowly destroy our brain.

Instead of believing that watching TV can help us to develop our critical thinking skills, those who disagree with the idea point out that watching TV can, in fact, destroy our mental ability. According to the researchers from the Universities of California and San Francisco, the more time a person spends on watching TV, the worst their cognitive performance is. The researchers study the relationship between individuals watching TV and how they cognitive function. They looked at 3,247 adults aged between 18 and 30 on how much TV they watched on average and tested for their processing speed and verbal functioning. The result concludes that “low levels of physical activity and high levels of television viewing during young to mid-adulthood were associated with worse cognitive performance in midlife”. When people watch more TV and exercise less, their cognitive performance starts to slow down because their brain and body were adapt to the kind of behavior and message that watching TV suggests-stop being active and respond slowly to the environment around them. When we are watching TV, we completely relaxed and shut off our body and brain normal function in order to get ourselves more comfortable, or in this case, too comfortable. Eventually, this kind of comfort worsens our cognitive performance and it can also slowly demolish our mental ability.

Although the debates between whether or not watching TV can make us smarter or dumber will never come to an end and that there will always be different opinions among our society, we should always respect each side’s arguments while defending ours. While those who believe in watching TV think that it helps with critical thinking and emotional and social intelligence and those who don’t believe in the idea think that TV encourages antisocial attitudes and destroy our mental ability, with our advancement in scientific research and given time, there will be one day where we can all come to an agreement on this matter of watching TV.