Research on the correlation between exposure to violent media and violent behavior is inconclusive due to the difficulty in defining aggression and the challenge of conducting research on individuals with varying backgrounds. Studies have shown both positive and negative effects of violent media, and the purity of research is often criticized.
The term media violence research refers to studies or clinical experiments that attempt to define how much people’s actions are affected by exposure to violent media such as film, television, and video games. There are studies designed to show this effect to be minimal, and many research efforts that claim to show connections between violent media and violent or more aggressive behavior. These oppositional purposes create strong arguments for and against the position that people show more aggression when exposed to more violent images. There is no consensus, despite studies dating back at least 50 years, on the connection between exposure to images and violent acts. This is perhaps partly because this area is notoriously difficult to study and information derived from research or analysis can be conflicting.
A challenge in conducting research on media violence is that it is not pure. Historical studies in this area used groups of children and showed them violent cartoon images, then studied their behavior in play settings to see if they were more aggressive. Children shown with violent images are more aggressive, although such studies usually do not account for the duration of aggressive behavior. Opponents of this type of study say some of these children may have been more aggressive to begin with, may have come from families with more stressful social dynamics, and are highly unlikely to have seen a violent picture for the first time in the study. . Because humans being evaluated come to these studies with different backgrounds, it is difficult to say whether aggressive behavior has a direct causal relationship to violent imagery.
To counter this critique, some research on media violence that affirms connections between witnessed and performed aggression can study the rise of violent images in media and match this with corresponding biases in cultural violence.
Some see more violence in the population, others find less. Again, the argument exists that it’s hard to know exactly how much violence the average person sees and whether that makes them more or less violent. Additionally, there are studies that may show positive benefits for activities such as playing video games; a research study in 2010 concluded that gaming can help relieve depression in adolescents.
The purity of media violence research takes another blow from critics on both sides because violence or aggression is not well defined and most studies look at a relatively short period of time. If assessing a direct connection between violent imagery and subsequent violent behavior, researchers need to define what that behavior would include. Sometimes, the definition of aggression is extremely broad and other times it is very narrow. These differing definitions make it difficult to determine exactly how closely “aggressive” images and behaviors are united and how serious that link is.
Ultimately, media violence research seeks to answer questions about the correlation between violent media exposure and violent human behavior. While there is a preponderance of these studies, they do not necessarily prove the cause or lack thereof. Humans cannot be studied in a vacuum, and it is difficult to conduct research on people who may already have different experiences in their past that could make them more or less aggressive. Furthermore, defining aggression or violence remains a challenge and poses problems for any research in this area.
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