Psychology 101: Introduction to Psychology (Professor Fong)
Excerpt from an article by Cook, T.D., Kendzierski, D.A., & Thomas, S.V. (1983). The implicit assumptions of television research: An analysis of the 1982 NIMH report on Television and Behavior. Public Opinion Quarterly, 47, 161-201.
"The evidence indicates that a small association can regularly be found between viewing violence on television and later aggression when individual differences in aggression are controlled at one time. But is the association causal? If we were forced to render a judgment, it would be: Probably yes.
"This judgment is also influenced by the past literature. In particular, the randomized experiments in laboratory settings very strongly suggest that violence on the screen can cause aggression in normal populations, even though they do not speak directly to whether televised violence causes aggression in other settings. Further, the slowly growing file of case studies of imitative violence indicate that events which are rare in real life have sometimes been committed soon after they were televised as part of a dramatic fictional show or a news account. This suggests that television violence can cause violence in nonlaboratory settings on the part of presumably abnormal people. Thus, there is strong evidence of causation in the wrong setting (the laboratory) with the right population (normal children), and in the right setting (outside of the laboratory) with the wrong population (abnormal adults). Such auxiliary evidence...does provide circumstantial evidence of causal connections.
"What's missing in the NIMH report, as in nearly all television research, are mechanisms for going from the evidence produced by television researchers to changes in television practice."