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There can no longer be any doubt that heavy exposure to televised violence is one of the causes of aggressive behavior, crime, and violence in society. The evidence comes from both laboratory and real-life studies.1 Television violence affects youngsters of all ages, of both genders, at all socioeconomic levels, and at all levels of intelligence. The effect is not limited to children who are already disposed to being aggressive and is not restricted to this country. The fact that this same finding of a relation between television violence and aggression in children is obtained in study after study, in one country after another, cannot be ignored. The causal effect of television violence on aggression, even though it is not very large, exists. It cannot be denied or explained away. This causal effect has been demonstrated outside the laboratory in real-life among many different children. It appears that a vicious cycle exists in which television violence makes children more aggressive, and these more aggressive children turn to watching more violence to justify their own behaviors.
More than 35 years ago, when I started to do research on how children learn to be aggressive, I had no idea how important TV was as a determinant of aggressive behavior. I thought it was no more influential than the Saturday afternoon serial westerns that I used to attend, or the fairy stories my parents used to read to me before I went to bed or the comic books I pored over instead of doing my lessons. These, certainly, were very violent. But I grew up OK. I didn't enter into a life of crime. I was not very violent. So I was skeptical about the effects of television violence, and I think most people come to this subject matter with this same sort of mind-set, unconvinced that television can have such deleterious effects.
However, in 1960, we completed a survey of all third-grade school children in a semirural county in New York.2 We interviewed 875 boys and girls in school and conducted separate interviews with 80% of their parents. We were interested in how aggressive behavior, as it is manifested in school, is related to the kinds of childrearing practices parents use. An unexpected finding was that for boys,...