Television’s introduction into a community raised child aggression across the board

Evidence

With anticipatory ingenuity, Williams (1986) conducted a quasi-experiment that shed highly informative light on how the introduction of television alters the life of a community. Williams studied three towns in the Canadian Rockies before they received television reception via cable at staggered times and over a two-year period thereaf-ter. Changes in level of aggression were measured as one of the many social effects. Children’s physical and verbal aggression were measured during free-play periods in school and by teacher and peer ratings. The introduction of television substantially increased the children’s level of aggression over the two-year period. The effects were not confined to a subset of children. … Both boys and girls behaved more aggressively. Those initially low and high in aggressiveness exhibited the increases as well. There was also a dose of exposure effect. Higher viewing was accompanied by higher aggressiveness. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 770

Categorization

• SEED: The staggered cable introduction across three matched Canadian towns is a methodological case study in quasi-experimental identification worth an essay on natural experiments.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 770