How Does Media Violence Cause Aggression?

Media Violence and the effects on aggression have been a controversial topic for over 50 years. Just recently, in 2011, the Supreme Court struck down a law in California where they were attempting to ban violent video games (Ramos et al., 2013). There have been many studies done to imply that excessive violent media exposure leads to aggression (Ramos et al., 2013). I am not agreeing or disagreeing that media violence exposure always causes aggressive behavior, I will argue that there are situational circumstances that need to be addressed. In the next few paragraphs, I will discuss these situational circumstances, gender and ethnicity differences, and possibilities for behavioral reconstructions.
According to Krahe et al. (2012), there are three main mechanisms that contribute to media violence causing aggression: observational learning, development of aggressive scripts, and emotional habituation to the pain and suffering of others. Observational learning occurs when a behavior is observed, cognitive structures are formed, and the behavior is repeated. The development of aggressive scripts happen when the observational learning are integrated into a the mind for future …show more content…
Girls tend to watch violent media less than boys and boys tend to watch higher levels of violent media than girls (Krahe et al., 2012). There is also a difference between violent media consumption, empathy, real and fictional clips between genders. According to Ramos et al. (2013), girls demonstrated greater empathy after violent media exposure when victims of real violence were shown. Everyone when primed with real verse fictional showed increased empathy overall. This research had mainly hispanic participants which could be influential in the results. Collective cultures could harbor more empathy than individualistic cultures. This is somethings to look further into. Next I will discuss possibly behavioral