Page 285 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research
P. 285

274                                              SPARKS AND SPARKS

        success in the game. However, if they pressed the “hurt” button, they
        were told that the handle would become too hot to touch and, thus, would
        result in hurting the child’s progress in the game. Those children who
        watched the violent film clip prior to being placed in this situation were
        more likely to press the “hurt” button and more likely to keep the button
        pressed for a long duration than were the children who watched the
        sports program. Stein and Friedrich (1972) conducted another experiment
        with children that randomly assigned subjects to view Batman and Super-
        man cartoons (violent condition) or episodes of Mister Rogers Neighborhood
        (prosocial condition). During the two weeks of observation following this
        manipulation, the children who viewed the violent cartoons were more
        likely to be aggressive in their interactions with other children than were
        the children who viewed the prosocial programming. Both of these early
        experiments, along with the ones by Bandura mentioned earlier, helped to
        attract attention to the potential problem of media violence as a facilitator
        of aggression.
           In contrast to these early experiments that used children as the research
        subjects, Leonard Berkowitz conducted a series of experiments that used
        college students as subjects (Berkowitz & Alioto, 1973; Berkowitz & Geen,
        1966, 1967; Berkowitz & LePage, 1967; Berkowitz & Powers, 1979;
        Berkowitz & Rawlings, 1963). The typical paradigm employed in these
        investigations was to expose subjects who were either provoked or
        unprovoked by an experimenter to either violent media or nonviolent
        media. Following exposure, Berkowitz discovered that provoked subjects
        behaved more aggressively to the experimenter after viewing violence
        than after viewing nonviolence.
           Laboratory experiments, although capable of providing unequivocal
        evidence for cause-effect relationships, are more equivocal in their appli-
        cation to various contexts that exist outside the laboratory. Scholars and
        critics who offer a dissenting view from the strong consensus that exists
        among social scientists on the effects of media violence usually feature
        some version of the argument that laboratory experiments lack ecological
        validity. As Zillmann and Weaver (1999) have recently noted, “It seems
        that critics of media-violence research could only be satisfied with longi-
        tudinal experimental studies in which, within gender and a multitude of
        personality variables, random assignment is honored and exposure to
        violent fare is rigorously controlled—that is, with research that in a free
        society simply cannot be conducted” (p. 147). In addition, it also seems
        that critics demand that researchers be able to set up real-world opportu-
        nities for aggression in order to settle the controversy about the generaliz-
        ability of laboratory findings to settings outside the lab. Of course, even if
        it were possible to do so, researchers would never want to set up such
        opportunities for ethical reasons. Despite the limitations of experimenta-
   280   281   282   283   284   285   286   287   288   289   290