Televised fictional aggression can directly model criminal methods for audiences

Evidence

According to data collected by the Federal Aviation Agency, for two months following the broadcast, there was an eightfold increase in attempted extortions using an identical scenario. Requests by the airline industry to remove this hazardous drama from the airwaves were rebuffed. Airlines continued to be subjected to extortion threats a day or two after the program was shown as a rerun in different cities in the United States and abroad. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 735

Categorization

• XREF: Provides concrete causal evidence of media modeling harm that corroborates the vault’s existing claims about how ordinary people absorb and rationalize harmful templates of behavior.
• SEED: An angle: real cases where fiction seeded copycat crime as inadvertent natural experiments proving media-modeling causal power.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 735