Study: Watching TV Increases Teen, Adult Aggression
By Shankar Vedantam Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, March 28, 2002; 2:32 PM
Watching three or more hours of television a day greatly increases the risk that adolescents and young adults will become violent, according to a major new study released today.
The risk of violence appears to progressively increase with exposure to violent programming, according to the study, which involved following 700 young people over a 16-year period.
The study is the most comprehensive to date about the effects of television violence on teens and those in their 20s and shows for the first time that the effects of TV violence are not limited to children, but persist well into adulthood.
"People think the correlation is trivial," said Brad Bushman, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University at Ames. But "the correlation between violent media and aggression is larger than the effect that wearing a condom has on decreasing the risk of HIV. It's larger than the correlation between exposure to lead and decreased IQ levels in kids. It's larger than the effects of exposure to asbestos. It's larger than the effect of second-hand smoke on cancer."
Television proponents said the jury is still out on the effects of violent programs, and that a new ratings system and V-chip technology allowed viewers to block out violent programs.
Among youths who watched less than an hour of television daily at age 14, just 5.7 percent were involved in aggressive acts by the ages of 16 to 22, the study, in Friday's issue of the journal Science, found.
For those who watched between one and three hours, the aggression rate jumped to 22.5 percent, and the rate was 28.8 percent for those who watched more than three hours, the study found.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.