ARE MEDIA CRIMINALLY LIABLE FOR EFFECTS OF VIOLENT CONTENT?

ARE MEDIA CRIMINALLY LIABLE FOR EFFECTS OF VIOLENT CONTENT?

From time to time, lawyers defending perpetrators of violent crimes who appear to have been affected by television have used rather creative defenses, which inevitably come up against First Amendment freedom- of-speech issues. Consider the following: Ronald Zamora, 15, killed his 82-year-old neighbor in a robbery attempt after she discovered Zamora and threatened to call the police. What was particularly unusual was that the defense attorney argued for temporary insanity at the time of the crime, arguing that Zamora was “suffering from and acted under the influence of prolonged, intense, involuntary, subliminal television intoxication” (Liebert & Sprafkin, 1988, p. 127). He further argued that the shooting was a TV-learned conditioned response to the stimulus of the victim’s threatening to call the police. Television was thus an accessory to the crime. In the end, however, the jury failed to accept this reasoning, and Zamora was convicted on all counts and sentenced to life.

A second case involved 9-year-old Olivia Niemi, who was assaulted and raped with a bottle by three older girls and a boy. Four days before, a TV movie, Born Innocent, had been aired, showing a scene of a girl being raped with a plumber’s plunger. Olivia’s mother then sued NBC for $11 million for alleged negligence in showing the movie in prime time. Her lawyer argued for vicarious liability and claimed that the movie had incited the children to criminal activity. After a series of appeals and countersuits, the case was finally thrown out when a judge ruled that the plaintiff had to prove that the network had intended its viewers to imitate the violent sexual acts depicted. However, when NBC aired Born Innocent as a rerun, it aired at 11:30 p.m. and with most of the critical rape scene edited out (Liebert & Sprafkin, 1988).

Such cases are not unique to television. The magazine Soldier of Fortune ran the following classified ad:

FOR HIRE: U.S. Marine and Vietnam veterans. Weapons specialists with jungle expertise for high-risk assignments in the United States or overseas. Call__.

267 A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication

Texan Robert Black hired a former marine through this ad, with the assignment of murdering his wife. Her surviving family brought suit against the magazine for negligence and was awarded $9.4 million in damages in a federal court case (Brockhoff, 1988). The legal basis of the judgment was that the magazine should have known that its offer included illegal acts such as murder. How much responsibility does a publisher or broadcaster have to anticipate such consequences of its messages?

Sometimes the nature or timing of the response can be taught through media. For example, Grossman (1996, 1998) argued that violent TV and movies, and especially violent video games, train children to shoot without thinking at the appearance of certain stimulus. The normative behavior in many video games is to shoot as soon as some target appears, with the fastest reaction the most optimal. Thus, the child playing video games, Grossman argues, is learning to shoot first and ask questions later. Does this learned shooting behavior transfer to other situations? Grossman (1998) cited one of the boys charged in the 1998 Jonesboro, Arkansas schoolyard shootings who had little if any experience shooting real guns but a lot of experience playing video games. He and his buddy were good enough shots to hit 15 people with 27 shots from a distance of 100 yards! Research on video games is discussed later in the chapter.

There are other, even more indirect ways in which modeling may occur. Violence may alter the general affective (emotional) responsiveness of the viewer, which could in turn lead to violent behavior. It may also raise the overall arousal level, which could prime the person for (among other behaviors) violence. Now let us turn to some of the research done to test the modeling hypothesis and to identify the conditions under which modeling occurs.

Basic Social Learning and field Research. The best-known early research studying modeling of media violence was social psychologist Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll studies (Bandura, 1965; Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1963; see also Hicks, 1965). In a typical Bobo doll study testing modeling, Bandura had young children watch someone else behave aggressively toward a large plastic inflatable doll. The child’s own behavior with the Bobo doll was subsequently observed. Studies of this type consistently demonstrated that children imitated violent behavior previously observed in

a live model. Most important for our purposes, the same effect was found when the aggressive model was on film rather than live (Bandura, et al.,

Violence: Watching All That Mayhem Really Matters 268

1961; Nelson, Gelfand, & Hartmann, 1969; Rosencrans & Hartup, 1967; Walters & Willows, 1968).

Many laboratory studies have replicated these effects over the years and have demonstrated generalization to other behaviors. For example, participants who had seen a series of violent films were more likely to respond negatively to a research assistant in an “unrelated” study who had written insulting comments on a questionnaire they had completed (Zillmann & Weaver, 1999).

Although these experimental studies were important, they were not without criticism. Primarily, they were attacked for being too artificial and of questionable generalizability to the real world. However, later research moving away from the laboratory also found corroborative evidence for modeling (Huesmann, Lagerspetz, & Eron, 1984; Joy, Kimball, & Zabrack, 1986; Lefkowitz, Eron, Walder, & Huesmann, 1977; Ley ens, Camino, Parke, & Berkowitz, 1975; Parke, Berkowitz, Leyens, West, & Sebastian, 1977). The rates of violent crimes rose in societies following the introduction of television with its steady diet of violence. For example, although the homicide rate for White Americans and Canadians rose 93% and 92% respectively between 1945 and 1974, it declined by 7% in the same period for White South Africans, living in comparable economic conditions, except for the lack of television, which was not introduced in South Africa until 1975 (Centerwall, 1989a, 1989b, 1992, 1993; Joy, Kimball, & Zabrack, 1986). After the introduction of TV, the homicide rate rose there as well. Centerwall rules out other explanations like economics, age, firearm availability, and civil unrest as causing these changes. Thus, there is evidence that modeling media violence is not purely an artificial laboratory phenomenon.

Sensitization

Sensitization is a sort of reverse modeling effect, whereby viewers react so strongly to seeing some violence and have such a traumatized perceived reality that they are actually less likely to imitate it as a result. This is most likely to occur with very extreme violence and might be the reaction, for example, of someone who has never seen anything stronger than a G-rated Disney movie to seeing a graphically violent R-rated film. The behavioral tendency away from violence might arise from either the arousal of anxiety about the violence and/or the arousal of empathy for the victim of the violence. For example, Tamborini, Stiff, and Heidel (1990) used physiological and questionnaire measures to conclude that people who most dislike watching graphic violence (i.e., those who are most sensitized) are those who score high in the empathy dimensions of wandering imagination, fictional involvement, humanistic orientation, and emotional contagion. That

269 A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication

is, these people can more easily imagine themselves in the position of the victim of the violence and vicariously experience the negative emotions that person would feel. Someone who cannot easily do this would also be aroused but would be more likely to enjoy the violence, because the negative emotions would not be so strongly felt.

It is likely that the strongest Sensitization effects could come from very graphic violence that is clearly understood as real (i.e., the news). Sometimes producers face a difficult decision as to whether to air an extremely violent scene from a news story (see Box 9.3 for some especially compelling examples). Once in a while they may be unable to block the image, such as if it comes in the form of a political ad, which may not legally be censored. Although product and political advertisers generally are loathe to offend, once in a great while a political candidate may desire to. In the fall 1992 U.S. election campaigns, several anti-abortion candidates for Congress and other offices chose to air photos of what they said was an aborted fetus. Their explicit goal was to offend viewers, or rather to show them how offensive abortion really is. Such tactics are risky, however, because viewers might be even more offended by their decision to use such an image.

BOX 9.3