The Influence Of Media Violence On Youth Throughout History
It is that: The only thing that is constant is change. Some changes are intentional, whereas some are a result of experiences and influence. We are all on different levels we choose to better ourselves at things that have our interest and are passionate about, not everyone can read us as and when they want to mystery, we are. Influence is a big word and surrounds life, influence means several factors that are primarily behavior based that affect a person’s emotions, behaviors, opinions, and decision-making process. These factors are learning, perception, self-concept, attitudes, personality, and life styles. Through a combination of these various factors a consumer displays certain tendencies toward products, services, actions, and mentalities. So let's research this topic in more detail in "The Influence Of Media Violence On Youth Essay" paper.
There are three broad verities of social influence identified by Harvard psychologist Herbert Kelman:
- Compliance is when people appear to agree with others but actually keep their dissenting opinions private (The act of responding favorably to an explicit or implicit request offered by others. Technically, compliance is a change in behavior but not necessarily in attitude, one can comply due to mere obedience or by otherwise opting to withhold private thoughts due to social pressures. The satisfaction derived from compliance is due to the social effect of the accepting influence.
- Identification is when people are influenced by someone who is liked and respected, such as a famous celebrity (The changing of attitudes or behaviors due to the influence of someone who is admired. Advertisements that rely upon celebrity endorsements to market their products are taking advantage of this phenomenon. The desired relationship that the identifier relates to the behavior or attitude change.
- Internalization is when people accept a belief or behavior and agree both publicly and privately (The process of acceptance of a set of norms established by people or groups that are influential to the individual. The individual accepts the influence because the content of the influence accepted is intrinsically rewarding. It is congruent with the individual's value system; the 'reward' of internalization is 'the content of the new behavior'.
Most of the people use these factors to push against as they struggle to establish their own independent identities.
When individuals try to control over their lives is something everyone wants. However, in a universe in which everything is mutually interdependent, none of them has absolute control over anything including, much of the time, themselves. Rather, what they all have in abundance is influence, the power of which seems to function linearly: the closer personally and physically others are to the individual, the greater the individual’s influence over them, and vice versa. Even more interestingly, unlike their attempts to control, their attempts to influence do not require their conscious intent. Which is why their ability to influence others is so much more important than the individual’s ability to control them; always-exerting influence simply by being who they are, saying what they say, and doing what they do. The only real choice they have in the matter is whether, or not the influence they exert is good or bad.
Everyone's life-condition tends towards the average of those around him or her. If someone is up and another one is down, he or she will each tend to pull one another toward his/her own inner states, usually both moving toward the mean between them. Some people have exceptionally resilient life-conditions that are like rigid magnets, pulling others up or down powerfully without tending to move much themselves under the influence of the life-conditions of others. While most of the people may aspire to possess that strength, most of them have not achieved it.
Children may pull out wise protectors or fed-up disciplinarians. Co-workers may pull out inspiring leaders or complaining gossips. Some people are simply toxic, complaining constantly, gossiping mercilessly, and even purposely sabotaging others. The factors that help influence to spread among the world are many, one of them is Mass Media the creation of a new channel to influence people, especially those who are young, children and youth are the most affected people regarding their unstable, changeable and forming characters.
Therefore what is Mass media: mass media can be described as written, spoken or broadcast communication? Some of the popular forms of mass media are newspapers, magazines, radio, advertisements, social media, television, Internet; music videos, videogames, and films/movies. Mass communication refers to the technology that is used to communicate to a large group, or groups of people in a short time frame.
There are four major functions of mass media. The first is for surveillance. This is to provide information about issues, events and developments in society. The second is correlation. Media must interpret events and issues and ascribe meaning so that individuals understand their roles in society. A term that best fits with correlation is agenda setting, which means the media does not tell you what to think, but what to think about. Media tells you what is and is not important and to what degree. The third is cultural transmission. This is where the media aids the transference of dominant cultures and subcultures from one generation to the next or to immigrants. The last function of mass media is to simply entertain.
Media today is forever changing. The fact that technology evolves and changes “drives the development of media, because we as a society are always using mass media there are consequences and effects that have been laid on the forefront of mass media. Certain scholars, scientist and researchers “believe that the mass media shape the way people view the world, especially when people have little direct experience; others point to the media as providing role models positive and negative imitated by members of the audience”. The portrayal of violence in the media seems to be the most talked about issue, but other “behavioral areas are of concern”. These arguments tend to be based on “the supposition that the experience of the content presented by contemporary mass media differs in some qualitative way from other material that people have been exposed to since the beginning of social communication”. Attempts to “hold mass-media corporations legally responsible for the criminal acts of the consumers of their products have failed, and a general consensus has been reached that people will have to continue to be responsible for their own behaviors in the age of mass media”. Mass media is one of the great factors nowadays in influencing youth in a negative way with violence materials exposed to them.
A research on violent television and films, video games, and music reveals unequivocal evidence that media violence increases the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long- term context. Well-supported theory delineates why and when exposure to media violence increases aggression and violence. Media violence produces short-term increases by priming existing aggressive scripts and cognitions, increasing psychological arousal, and triggering an automatic tendency to imitate observed behaviors. Media violence produces long-term effects via several types of learning processes leading to acquisition of lasting and automatically accessible aggressive scripts, interpretational schemas, and aggression supporting beliefs about social behavior and by reducing individuals normal negative emotional responses to violence.
So when it comes to violence we can extend to some forms of violence just to clarify how some people apply this kind of violence influenced by mass media:
- Physical violence: physical violence is any intentional act causing injury or trauma to another person or animal by way of bodily contact.
- Psychological violence: Psychological violence, though can be just as devastating as physical violence. Psychological violence can affect the inner thoughts and feelings as well as exert control over life, it leaves a feeling of uncertain of the world around and unsafe. Psychological violence can destroy intimate relationships, friendships and even the one’s relationship with him or herself. When psychological violence is applied to children impair their development into a healthy adult.
- Verbal violence: a negative defining statement told to the victim or about the victim, or by withholding any response, thereby defining the target as non-existent. If the abuser does not immediately apologize and retract the defining statement, the relationship may be a verbally abusive one. Anger underlies, motivates and perpetuates verbally abusive behavior.
- Sexual violence: is a sexual act committed against someone without that person’s freely given consent and will, Sexual violence is a serious public health problem and has a profound short or long-term impact on physical and mental health.
- Culture violence: is any aspect of a culture that can be used to legitimize violence in its direct or structural form, when a person is harmed as a result of practices that are part of his or her culture, religion or tradition.
Going back to the influence of violence media we have to put evidences of experiments and reports. In 1958, Bjorkqvist exposed 5 to 6 year old Finnish children to either violent or nonviolent films. Two raters who did not know which type of films the youngsters had seen then observed the children playing together in a room, compared with the children who had viewed the nonviolent film, those who had just watched the violent film were rated much higher on physical assault, hitting other children, wresting, etc. As well as other types of aggression. The results for physical assault were highly significant and the effect size was substantial.
Moreover, in 1987 Josephson randomly assigned 396 seven to nine year old boys 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 movie any boy had seen recorded the number of times each boy physically attacked another boy during the game. Physical attack was defined to include hitting, elbowing or shoving another player to the floor, as well as tripping, kneeing, pilling hair, and other assaultive behaviors that would be penalized in hockey (the only verbal act included in the measure was insulting another player with abusive name). One added element in this study was that a specific cue that had appeared in the violent film (a walki-talki) was carried by the hockey referees in some conditions. This particular cue presumably reminded the boys of the movie they had seen earlier. Josephson found that for aggressive boys (those who scored above average on a measure of aggressiveness). The combination of seeing a violent film and seeing the movie associated cue stimulated significantly more assaultive behavior than any other combination of film and cue. The effect size was moderate.
The exposure to media violence increases the physical assault. Although witnessed violence can evoke aggression in people who are not highly emotionally aroused at the time, several experiments have shown that emotionally or physically excited viewers are especially apt to be aggressively stimulated by violent scenes. In 1969 Geen and O’Neal made an experiment, college men who had been provoked by another student and who were also exposed to loud noise shocked their provocateur significantly more intensely after they had watched a film of prizefight than after they had seen a movie of a track meet. The effect size was quite large and seemed to be accentuated by the viewers’ noise generated excitement. This study has been replicated with variations of film content and provocation with essentially identical results.
Exposure to media violence can cause immediate increases in aggressive thoughts and tolerance for aggression in both children and older youth. In 1975 Thomas and Drabman in a study with young children, youngsters shown a brief violent film clip were slower to call an adult to intervene when they saw two younger children fighting than were peers who had watched a neutral film. The single violent clip appeared to make the children more tolerant of aggression. At least temporarily.
The amount of television and films violence young people regularly watch affects the physical aggression, verbal aggression, and aggressive thoughts of them. In 1972 Mcleod, Atkins and Chaffe studied the correlations between “ aggressive behavioral delinquency “ and viewing of Television violence in samples of Wisconsin and Maryland high school and junior high school students. They found significant correlations ranging from 17 to 28 for both males and females. Frequent viewing of violence in the media is associated with comparatively high levels of aggressive behavior.
In late 1970s, Huesmann and his colleagues began a longitudinal study of the effect of Television violence in five countries. Representative samples of middle class youth in each country were examined at three times as they grew from 6 to 8 or from 8 to 11 years of age. Aggression was assessed by peer nominations in response to questions about physical and verbal behaviors, among other things. The cross sectional correlations between aggression and overall exposure to TV violence were positive and small to moderate in all countries, with significant correlations being obtained for both boys and girls in the United States. However, the extent to which earlier viewing of television violence predicted later aggression varied substantially between genders and among countries. In the United States, girls’ viewing of television violence had a significant effect equals 17, on their later aggression even after taking into account their early level of aggression. The boys samples in the United States Television violence alone did not predict later aggression, but those who had watched violent programming frequently in their early childhood and who also reported a strong identification with aggressive TV characters were generally regarded by their peers as the most aggressive. Fifteen years after the study started, more than 300 participants in the US sample were reinterviewed when they were in their early 20s; results from this 15-year follow up suggest a delayed effect of media violence on serious physical aggression. The researchers found significant correlations between television violence viewing during childhood and a composite measure of aggression (physical, verbal and indirect) during young adulthood for both men and women.
Turning to the violence influence of music videos in 1995 Baron Gan and Hall reported a study suggesting that antisocial lyrics without videos can affect behavior, but the assessed behavior was not clearly aggressive. Male college students listened to misogynous or neutral rap music, viewed three vignettes (neutral, sexual and violent, assaultive) and then chose ones of the three vignettes to be shown to an unknown female (who was actually a member of the research team) those who had listened to the misogynous music were significantly more likely than those in the neutral music condition to select the assaultive vignette. Another study examined how music videos affect adolescents’ aggressive thinking and attitudes, American African adolescents were randomly assigned to an experimental condition in which they viewed nonviolent rap music videos containing sexually subordinate images of women or to a no music videos control condition. When queried about their attitudes, the young women who saw the demeaning videos indicated greater acceptance of teen dating violence that did comparable women in the control condition.
One of the most played games around the world are video games, when it comes to video games that does not include children only also youth and adult are addicted to video games, which opens another gate of the violence influence through another channel of Media and technology in our life. Several randomized experiments have tested the effects of video famed specifically selected to differ in violent content but no in arousal or effective properties. Anderson al tested the effects of ten video games on physiological arousal and several affect-relevant dimensions, including frustration, difficulty, and enjoyment, and then selected two games that were similar on these measures but different in violent content. In two subsequent experiments, the violent game significantly increased aggressive behavior relative to the nonviolent video games on aggression is independent of the games’ effects on arousal or affect.
Studying the correlation between time spent playing violent video games and aggression is a must just to determine whether the frequency or the content that affects the behavior. Anderson and Dill in 2000 created a composite measure of recent exposure to violent video games, and correlated it with college students’ self-reported acts of aggressive delinquent behavior in the past year (hitting or threatening other students, attacking someone with the idea of seriously hurting or killing him or her, participating in gangs fights, throwing objects at other people) the overall correlation between exposure to violent video games and violent behavior was significant. The magnitude of the association decreased but remained significant when analyses controlled for antisocial personality, gender, and total time spent playing any type of video games.
Observation affects the behavior cause according to observational learning theory, the likelihood that an individual will acquire an observed behavior is increased when the model performing the behavior is similar to or attractive to the viewer, the viewer identifies with the model, the context is realistic, and the viewed behavior is followed by rewarding consequences. A child immediate imitation of observed behaviors would probably be the simplest example of observational learning though some scholars would suggest that there should be a lag before the imitation occurs for it to be called learning.
The influence of violence mass media nowadays is a big problem that concerns not only the scientist but also the public as a fear of what is coming and affecting generations, how this world wide important point turn the future more than it is turning the present, because of the great opened gate to media and the acceptance of its good and its bad we are more in danger, the negativity keeps on getting bigger and bigger every day due to the lack of control.
We introduced some of the meanings of psychological influence, media success invading and changing life, violence and its effects then studies with proved experiments as an evidence of the influence of media violence on youth and life in general. We live in a generation of not being in love, and not being together, but we sure make it feel like we are together.
Reference:
- https://www. psychologytoday. com/blog/happiness-in-world/201505/the-power-influence
- https://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Social_influence
- http://journals. sagepub. com/doi/abs/10. 1111/j. 1529-1006. 2003. pspi_1433. x
