Chris Kromm wrote:
>
> Quote: "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."
>
> [clip most of article]
> 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.
Otherwise put:
70% of those who watched over 3 hours of tv a day exhibited violence in their personal life.
Hypothesis: Family violence is a well known background with violent behavior. (Some very high proportion of men on Death Rows were seriously abused, physically and sexually) as children.
Watching TV would be a reasonable way to withdraw from such violence. The high proportion (70%) of heavy TV-Viewers who successfully lead non-violent lives may be due to their use of that device to insulate themselvesd from surrounding violence.
I don't have the foggiest notion if this reading is remotely sensible, but I do think the professor should offer some tentative explanation for tv 'causing' violence in some cases (30%) and not in others (70%).
Carrol
P.S. The decision to focus on the smaller or the larger figure as primary in any quantitative relation is always a complex one. In the case of unemployment figures reactionaries focus on the larger figure (of employed persons). That is obviously wrong. But it is not clear at all to me that either the larger or the smaller figure of tv-violence correlation is relevant.
>
> The Associated Press contributed to this report.