First, I strongly recommend Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, which I wrote with Gloria DeGaetano. It has been updated extensively in recent years to provide the best collection of information in this field. If you’d like to dig deeper into the research, studies as far back as the 1950s identified media violence’s potential to harm the development of children. Since then, thousands of studies have confirmed that children behave more aggressively after witnessing violent behavior in television shows, movies, and videos. According to psychologists Huesmann and Miller, “In these well-controlled laboratory studies there can be no doubt that it is the children’s observation of the scenes of violence that is causing the changes in behavior.”1
Thirty years of research has proven time and time again that violent video games are bad for our kids. All the experts agree. The 2015 American Psychological Association resolution on violent video games states: “The link between violent video game exposure and aggressive behavior is one of the most studied and best established.… Scientific research has demonstrated an association between violent video game use and both increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive affect, aggressive cognitions and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy, and moral engagement.” The APA is made up of more than 120,000 researchers, psychologists, psychiatrists, students, and educators.
Iowa State University Distinguished Professor of Psychology Craig Anderson, cited earlier for his work as director of the Center for the Study of Violence, has worked with educators, government officials, child advocates, and news organizations worldwide. After the Sandy Hook massacre, he was interviewed on CNN. “Why wasn’t the public aware of the research?” a reporter asked.
“It is the strength of the television, movies, and video game industries to keep the general public confused about media research. But there is no confusion about the research. The research is clear—media violence is a causal risk factor for violence,” he responded.
The research is clear—and voluminous. The following overview summarizes key findings that repeatedly demonstrate the connection between media viewing and deteriorating mental and physical health, poor academic performance, and increased aggression and violent behavior in our children. As noted, major media hardly ever reports these statistics, so, armed with this information, I urge you to understand the connection for yourself.
Thousands of studies over the years have demonstrated the negative effects of exposing young children to violent visual media. The American Academy of Pediatrics reissued its policy statement on media in 2009, stating:
Exposure to violence in media, including television, movies, music, and video games, represents a significant risk to the health of children and adolescents. Extensive research evidence indicates that media violence can contribute to aggressive behavior, desensitization to violence, nightmares, and fear of being harmed.… The evidence is now clear and convincing: media violence is one of the causal factors of real-life violence and aggression. Therefore, pediatricians and parents need to take action.2
In recent years the AAP has reaffirmed the importance of not exposing entertainment media of any kind to children under the age of two. The organization warns that television viewing in preschool children has been associated with a number of problems, including “speech delays, attention problems, obesity, and aggressive behavior.” Despite these warnings, which have been repeated since 1999, 90 percent of parents reported in a 2011 survey that their children under the age of two watch some form of electronic media, including one to two hours of televised programs per day. By age three, almost one-third of American children have televisions in their bedrooms.3
Michigan’s Child Care Expulsion Prevention (CCEP) Program provides mental health services for the parents and child care providers of kids under the age of five who are at risk for expulsion. The program focuses on nurturing the social-emotional development of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. Phrases such as “school expulsion” and “severe behavior problems” did not fit my ideas about two-, three-, and four-year-old children, but a consultant with the program explained that the highest rates of school expulsions actually occur at the preschool level, primarily for aggressive behavior like tantrums, biting, and kicking. The first national study of 3,898 publicly funded prekindergarten classrooms reported that 10.4 percent of prekindergarten teachers had expelled at least one preschooler in the past year, and that 19.9 percent of those preschoolers were expelled from more than one school. For every 1,000 students enrolled in preschool nationally, 6.67 were expelled—a rate that is 3.2 times higher than the rate of expulsion for K–12 students.4 When asked about the high rate of expulsion, the consultant explained that many factors are involved, including poverty, lack of prenatal care, and poor parenting skills, but she believed that the primary reason for the rise in expulsions is that these children suffer the ill effects of being immersed in TV and movies that model and reinforce aggressive behavior.
Excessive media viewing by preschool-aged children has been linked, in various studies, to aggression. One study showed that preschool children who watched violent TV programs were the most aggressive during free play. If one child had an object that another child wanted, the second child would hit or shove the first child and take the object. The study also found that children who watched violent programs alone, as opposed to watching with a parent or family member, were twice as verbally aggressive as other children in the study.5
By the time a child starts the first grade, he or she will have spent the equivalent of three school years in front of a television. Is it any surprise that aggressive behavior is on the rise in preschools and day care centers? Preschoolers learn by watching others, and they are learning from the media they consume.
In the early 1960s, the Stanford University psychologist Dr. Albert Bandura conducted studies designed to prove that children can learn new behavior by watching others. The first study included two groups of children between the ages of three and a half and five years old. Both groups were allowed to play with toys for twenty minutes. With the experimental group, an adult came into the room and displayed aggressive behavior using a five-foot-tall inflatable “Bobo doll.” The adult sat on the doll, punched it repeatedly in the nose, and beat it on the head with a mallet. The adult tossed the doll in the air and kicked it around the room. The adult used verbally aggressive phrases such as “Sock him in the nose” and “Kick him” while exhibiting these behaviors. The control group witnessed no adult modeling aggressive behavior.
Next, the experimenter led the children into a new room and showed them a set of popular toys. After a few minutes the researcher took these toys away, exposing the children to a mildly frustrating experience. They were then led to an adjoining room featuring a variety of toys, including both aggressive and nonaggressive items, and a Bobo doll and mallet. The experimenter worked quietly in the corner of the room while the children were observed through two-way mirrors and researchers recorded aggressive behaviors.
The results were staggering. The mean total aggression score for the control group was 54, while the children who watched a real person model aggressive behavior had a mean score of 83. The next year, Bandura tweaked the study: Instead of a real-life adult modeling the aggressive behavior, a TV in the room with one group played a film of an adult modeling aggressive behavior. Another group had a TV in the room showing a cartoon cat modeling identical aggressive behavior. The children who watched the film of the adult had a mean aggression score of 92, while the group that observed the cartoon had a score of 99.
The results of the study provide strong evidence that exposure to filmed aggression heightens aggressive reactions in children. Subjects who viewed the aggressive human and cartoon models exhibited nearly twice as much aggression than did subjects in the control group who were not exposed to the aggressive film content.6
This study is important for several reasons. It shows that a child can learn aggression by watching a film or cartoon in which aggressive behavior is demonstrated, even if the behavior isn’t reinforced by some kind of reward. Furthermore, watching aggression failed to act as catharsis and decrease aggression; it increased aggression substantially. Many of the children became almost “carbon copies” of their models, repeating the same behaviors and verbal statements they had observed.
Some of the highest levels of violence on television are portrayed in cartoons—including cartoons geared toward young children. A number of significant studies have gathered data on these shows. One study found five violent actions per hour during prime time on the three major networks and twenty violent actions per hour in children’s shows. Another researcher looked at violence in prime time network programs broadcast between the spring of 1993 and the fall of 2001 and found similar levels of violence. Violent acts appeared in six out of ten programs, at a rate of 4.5 acts per program. These studies also found that violence was rarely punished and often glamorized, with 40 percent of violent acts perpetrated by “good” guys. Those who commit violence in these shows are rarely sorry for their actions.7
One example of a violent children’s cartoon that at first glance appears to be harmless is The Powerpuff Girls, an older series that played extensively on cable and returned to the Cartoon Network in 2014. A broadcaster’s description of the cartoon urged audiences to “watch our kindergarten crime fighters kick major villain-butt in over an hour of additional ultra-powered action!”
The cartoon’s main characters—little girl superheroes—model high levels of violence. They spend most of their time beating up “bad guys,” and win the admiration of everyone around them. The cartoon was (and is) watched by children of all ages, including preschool and early elementary school students.
When the Cross National Television and Aggression Study examined the longitudinal relationship between viewing TV violence as an elementary school student and adult behavior fifteen years later in the United States, Finland, Poland, and Israel, it found that childhood exposure to media violence predicted aggressive behavior as adults for both males and females when the children identified with aggressive characters.8 Instead of blood, the sucker punches the Powerpuff Girls plant on their enemies’ faces result in bright bursts of light. The adults who created this gimmick must have thought it was cute, but the overall message is the same in terms of promoting violence: It’s good to go around punching people you don’t like.
For decades researchers have been investigating the link between shows like The Powerpuff Girls and aggressive behavior in children. In 1960, Dr. Leonard Eron initiated a study that has—almost by accident—revolutionized our understanding of the causes of aggression. Eron was a professor at Yale from the early to mid-1950s and a practicing psychologist who was concerned about youth aggression as the youth homicide rate climbed significantly between 1950 and 1960. The longitudinal study on aggression in children that he began in 1960 has grown to become one of the longest studies conducted to date. Eron’s staff interviewed the entire third grade of Columbia County, New York, and 80 percent of their parents in the hopes of identifying factors that led to increased aggression. Although the interviewers focused on questions concerning childrearing, which Eron hypothesized might be a factor in determining youth aggression, they began each survey with filler questions to help the parents feel more comfortable. Eron referred to these questions as “Ladies Home Journal questions.” They included the presumably innocuous “What are your child’s three favorite TV programs?”
Eron and his colleagues had no idea this question would prove to be important, but ultimately, he said, “the violence link just hit us in the face.” The more violence these third-grade children watched on television, the more aggressive they were in real life.
Dr. Rowell Huesmann began collaborating with Eron on the statistical analysis of the data. Ten years after the original study, they reinterviewed the students, who were by then in their late teens. This round of data confirmed Eron’s original findings: The students who had watched the most violent television as children had the highest rates of aggressive and criminal behavior as adults. They had been involved in more fights in school. Even those children who had not been described as aggressive in third grade but who had watched violent television at that time were more likely to be aggressive ten years later. Interestingly, their TV-viewing habits as young adults were unrelated to their levels of aggression as adults, leading Eron to remark, “Perhaps the most path-breaking early result concerned the discovered relation between early TV violence viewing and later aggression.” (Emphasis added.) Watching violent media as children predicted heightened levels of aggression and criminal activity ten years later—a fact that underscores just how harmful media violence is for young children in particular.
Follow-up studies were conducted in 1982, when the original group of students had reached approximately age thirty, and again between 1999 and 2002, when participants were approximately forty-eight.9 These studies continued to show that exposure to media violence on television during a child’s early years is correlated with aggression and involvement in criminal behavior as an adult.
Prior to this study, several short-term or experimental studies had demonstrated that children become more aggressive immediately after watching television violence. The long-term studies show that media violence consumed during childhood will influence adult behavior, resulting in significantly more (and more harmful) violent behavior throughout an individual’s lifetime. For example, men who were high TV violence viewers as children were significantly more likely to have pushed, grabbed, or shoved their spouses, and they were convicted of crimes at more than three times the rate of other men. Conversely, women who were high TV violence viewers as children reported having punched, beaten, or choked another adult at more than four times the rate of other women.
In 2003, Huesmann summarized the research on violent media exposure and aggressive behavior:
For better or worse the mass media are having an enormous impact on our children’s values, beliefs, and behaviors. In particular, the widespread portrayal of violence in dramatic programs is having an insidious effect. Hundreds of studies have confirmed that exposing our children to a steady diet of violence in the media makes our children more violence-prone. The psychological processes involved are not mysterious. Children learn by observing others, and the mass media provide a very attractive window for these observations.10
The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues statement of April 2014 included, as we have seen, the policy recommendations discussed in chapter 9. The SPSSI conducted an extensive review of research and built on earlier scientific statements issued by the American Medical Association, the U.S. Surgeon General, the National Institute of Mental Health, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the International Society for Research on Aggression. All of these statements concluded that media violence is a risk factor for aggression. The SPSSI summary is based on sixty years of high-quality research. It notes, “These reviews make it clear that media violence research has provided one of the largest and most well-understood bodies of scientific evidence in all of social and behavioral science.”
Although not all of the studies have identical results, the SPSSI review found remarkable consistency regardless of the type of research design used. Their conclusion: “Violent media increase the likelihood of later aggressive and violent behavior, and of factors known to increase aggressive and violent behavior, such as hostile feelings and thoughts.”
Most children who are brutalized by their exposure to violent media do not become violent—but they do become depressed and fearful. Many military service members and law enforcement officers remember people who washed out of basic training or the academy. These people wanted to stick it out, but the rigid discipline and intense violence proved too much for them. They became depressed. Likewise, when two-, three-, four-, and five-year-old children are exposed to intense violence through the media’s depictions of death and mayhem, it becomes too much for them. They may “drop out” of this boot camp of violence, but they are forever scarred by their experiences.
Studies have demonstrated a link between television viewing and depression not only in adults and teenagers but also in elementary school students. We’ve seen that early exposure to violent media convinces our young children that it is a jungle out there. Without the power to turn off the screens in their homes, most of these depressed children become victims. A few become bullies, empowered by the hate and fear they see displayed in violent visual media.
The alpha male or female in every tribe, in every herd, and in every flock is a bully who gets whatever he or she wants. In the animal kingdom, bullying is adaptive, appropriate, and desirable behavior. To stay civilized, however, human society must discourage bullying. Numerous studies and real-life tragedies have demonstrated that we have a growing problem with bullying in our schools. The issue gets worse each year. It is not just one big kid hassling one little kid, either. Today, gangs peck away at one poor victim using both violent acts on the playground and psychological torment that typically includes cyberbullying. The problem is widespread. When the Josephson Institute of Ethics surveyed 22,889 teenagers in 2012, 39 percent said that they had been “bullied, teased, or taunted in a way that seriously upset them,” and 50 percent said that they had “bullied, teased, or taunted someone at least once.”11 It is a problem particularly among teenage girls, who reported the highest incidence of bullying or being bullied.
In December 2011, my coauthor Kristine Paulsen’s home state of Michigan became the forty-eighth state to pass antibullying legislation. The law is named after Matt Epling, a boy who was assaulted by upperclassmen on his last day of eighth grade as part of a high school hazing tradition. Roughly forty days later, the night before Matt planned to submit formal charges, he took his own life. His parents will never know exactly why, though they were aware that Matt had received threats throughout the month. In the wake of the tragedy, Matt’s parents campaigned for passage of Matt’s Safe School Law, which now requires Michigan schools to adopt and implement a policy prohibiting bullying.
Today, all fifty states have passed antibullying legislation in response to an alarming increase of violence in our schools. While some adults contend that such acts have been around for decades and are a natural part of the school environment, many studies have shown that bullying causes social and emotional damage that can follow students into adulthood. Research conducted at Duke University, for example, confirms that bullied children are at greater risk for depression and panic disorders. There is, in addition, an increased risk for agoraphobia in females and for suicidal tendencies in males.12
The bullies themselves are also affected negatively. Dr. Leonard Eron reported that children who were aggressive at age eight were more likely to have made poor life choices by age forty, as determined by interviews with the subjects and their spouses. They also had more criminal offenses, traffic violations, and incidences of driving while intoxicated. He reported, “By the time a child is 8 years old, characteristic ways of behaving aggressively or non-aggressively have already been established. Aggression as a problem-solving behavior is learned very early in life, and it is learned very well; the payoff is tremendous.”13
In 2007, a team of researchers analyzed data from 9,816 adolescent students between the ages of eleven and fourteen who had taken the Healthy Behavior in School Children survey. They examined multiple risk factors associated with bullying behaviors among adolescents, including individual characteristics; interactions with peers, family, and school staff; community influence; and the role of media exposure. Their findings included the following:
• Victims of bullying are more likely to become bullies.
• Feeling helpless increases bullying behaviors.
• Students with parental emotional support are less likely to be bullies.
• Students who perceive social support from teachers are less likely to be bullies.
• The degree to which students see school as welcoming and fair makes them less likely to bully.
• Watching television increases bullying.
The authors of the study concluded, “Limiting television viewing hours, improving students’ abilities to access family support systems and improving school atmospheres are potentially useful interventions to limit bullying behavior.”14
Physical bullying isn’t the only kind of bullying. Stopbullying.gov, a federal government website, describes three kinds of bullying: physical bullying, verbal bullying, and social or relational bullying. This last form is more typical of girls than boys. Although many people think physical bullying is the most traumatic, indirect bullying can cause depression, insecurity, and anxiety, and in some cases has led to suicide. Many studies have identified high levels of physical aggression and violence on television and movies over the last fifty years, but TV also includes verbal and relational aggression that gets far less attention. This includes plotting or scheming to hurt someone, gossiping, spreading rumors, and excluding someone from a group. In a 2004 study, a team of researchers examined more than two hundred hours of television shows popular with British adolescents. Three of the four programs were made and still play in the United States: Friends, The Simpsons, and Star Trek. Overall, indirect or social/relational aggression was portrayed in 92 percent of the programs—almost twice the level of physical aggression. Verbal aggression also was present in 86 percent of the programs. Indirect aggressors were more likely to be female, attractive, and rewarded. In a follow-up to the 2004 study, researchers asked 347 students to identify who in their classes spread rumors or gossip. It is no surprise that girls who watched more television that featured indirect aggression were associated with high levels of this kind of behavior. The women or girls they idolized on TV taught them how to behave, and that behavior was full of social aggression.
Social bullying begins at a very young age. A recent study found that 92 percent of the top fifty programs for children between the ages of two and eleven had characters who practiced social aggression. The majority involved verbal aggression, including insults, name-calling, teasing, and sarcasm. The purpose was to undermine the self-esteem or social standing of another character.15
The link between bullying and school violence was exposed in research presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting in 2014. The organization estimated that two hundred thousand high school students from 15,000 U.S. high schools who were bullied brought weapons to school in 2011, and that youths who have been victimized are up to thirty-one times more likely to carry a weapon than those who have not.16
When bullying leads to violence on a large scale, it is devastating for our nation. Following the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, the Secret Service and the Department of Education conducted an extended analysis of school violence. The report, titled Implications for the Prevention of School Attacks in the United States, was released in 2002 and identified thirty-seven incidents involving 41 attackers that met the study’s definition of targeted school violence in the United States from December 1974 through May 2000. The locations of the schools involved included Littleton, Colorado; West Paducah, Kentucky; and Jonesboro, Arkansas. The report identified ten factors that assist in identifying potential school violence before the crimes occur. Key Finding No. 7 reads:
Almost three-quarters of the attackers felt persecuted, bullied, threatened, attacked or injured by others prior to the incident (71%, n=29). In several cases, individual attackers had experienced bullying and harassment that was long-standing and severe.… In some of these cases the experience of being bullied seemed to have a significant impact on the attacker and appeared to have been a factor in his decision to mount an attack at the school.
Early childhood exposure to cartoons and media violence lays a foundation for bullying and violent behavior at a young age. This, in turn, sets the stage for a society where children and adolescents immerse themselves in addictive video games that teach them how to kill, attack, and bully. In this way, media violence is a progressive problem. What starts with cartoons, movies, and television shows in the early years slides into violent video games in adolescence, causing children to sink deeper and deeper into the psychological and biological conditions that I’ve explored in these pages. We saw this downward spiral play itself out in the bizarre manifesto left by the UCSB killer, and we’ll see it again and again in coming years if we don’t change the way the video game industry operates in our country with respect to children.
I hope that this research continues to make it clear: This problem won’t go away if we don’t take action.