>Subject: Re: Escalation in film and culture > >>There *is* research that shows that watching violence leads to violent >>behaviour. See Bandura's experiments with bobo dolls, where the children >>who were shown violent material on t.v. then behaved violently toward the >>dolls, while the other children did not. I may need to brush up on my Bobo dolls, but I think the original (early 1960s) experiments in the Bandura studies did NOT involve TV violence per se. Children watched either LIVE human models or 8mm amateur films of those models. Quite different than watching, say, THE UNTOUCHABLES or GUNSMOKE or whatever TV series was feared to be too violent in 1960. Furthermore, the children were not simply shown adults performing aggressive acts on Bobo dolls and then turned loose on their own dolls. Rather some children saw the aggressors punished for their aggression, another group saw the aggressors rewarded, and the control group saw the aggressors receiving no consequences. Children who say aggressors punished tended to be less violent in their own play with the same dolls. While many studies since have shown more and better evidence of correlation between children watching TV violence and behaving aggressively, Bandura's studies seem to often be mischaracterized and obviously have been challenged a great deal on several grounds. . . . + . . . + . . . + * . * * . . . * "They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing." -- Cormac McCarthy, ALL THE PRETTY HORSES . + . . * . . . . + . . * . . + . . . * . . . + . . . + * . * * . . ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]