On Sat, 16 Mar 2002, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> >In these studies, films with aggressive
> >sexual content clearly provoke more negative attitudes
> >and behaviors towards women.
>
> Behaviors? What'd they do, follow the guys around afterwards? Or did
> they just ask them a battery of questions?
>
> Doug
It's pretty sneaky. The typical procedure is having the guys watch the film, one or a few days, and fill out some questionnaires. Then, in what they think is another study for a different researcher, they are assigned to be the teacher in an experiment about the "effects of shock punishment on learning". They see the learner hooked up to a shock apparatus, and are told to apply a shock to the learner when a mistake occurs on the learning task.
In fact, the learners are confederates of the researcher; the learner intentionally makes mistakes on the task and is not actually given a shock. The operational definition of aggression here is the duration of the shock the teacher thinks he is applying to the learner.
What the researchers typically find is that men exposed to the aggressive porn films tend to lean more on the shock button when the learner is a woman rather than a man. This doesn't happen when men are exposed to the nonviolent sexually explicit films.
Yeah, the procedure is a bit convoluted, but it's an ethical way of observing whether or not exposure to these films actually influences men's behavior.
Miles