Newsworthy crimes act as natural experiments in media-driven aggression contagion.
Evidence
These unintended powerful natural experiments, with fictional dramas and authentic newscasts as the vehicle, provide insights into the role of the media in the social transmission of forms of aggression that cannot be studied by other means. The causal relations revealed in the modeling of novel styles of aggression under naturally occurring conditions complement those verified in laboratory experiments. Once a novel idea is planted, some time must pass before it fades from public consciousness. Highly publicized novel modes of aggression typically trigger copycat events. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 760
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEEPTHINKING: The conflation of fictional dramas and authentic newscasts as equivalent ‘vehicles’ for social transmission is a genuinely troubling insight worth sitting with.
- SEED: Article angle: the ‘natural experiment’ status of mass-mediated crimes — using real-world criminal modeling as a method to study aggression transmission that lab ethics forbid.
Related
- Highly publicized novel aggressive acts trigger copycat imitations (similarity 0.88)
- Televised fictional aggression can directly model criminal methods for audiences (similarity 0.80)
- Media violence shapes aggression potential far more than it triggers immediate acts (similarity 0.80)
- Observed links between media violence and aggression have four rival causal explanations (similarity 0.80)
- Social science causality is established only through converging divergent methodologies (similarity 0.79)
- No single cause explains aggression; multiple determinants always operate together (similarity 0.78)