Michael Nellis 12 Jul 2003
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11 Jul 2003
According to the article: Washington state argues that the law is carefully tailored to withstand such a challenge because it focuses on the state's compelling interest in curbing hostile and antisocial behavior among youths, including violence and aggression toward law enforcement officers.
Which compelling interest does not actually exist, in my not so humble opinion. I firmly believe that there is no admissible evidence anywhere to support the contention by ultra-conservatives that any kind of material can be harmful to minors. State Representative Mary Lou Dickerson, D-Seattle, who sponsored the law, commented, "I strongly believe the courts will decide that the sickening levels of violence, brutality and racism being peddled to children for profit cannot be wrapped in our precious First Amendment." Lasnik questioned whether the law would accomplish the stated purpose of violence-prone socialization avoidance, and said it could be either too narrow or too broad, because the law specifically targets only those games which include violence against police agents.
This alone creates a fatal loophole in that game producers can set these games in police states where law enforcement is by army units, or in an anarchic regime where law enforcement is by vigilante groups. Or aliens trying to lend a hand with civilizing Planet Dirt. Or whatever.
This is besides the point, however. Getting back to my belief in the lack of admissible evidence that something can be Harmful To Minors!(tm)(r)(etc).
Once upon a long time ago, in the Golden Age of Greece, there lived a philospher by the name of Aristotle. He was brilliant in many regards, having written in his time on the topics of inductive logic, zoology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and physical science. And on that last topic he fell flat on his ass.
I read an anecdote one time, a perhaps apocryphal story, about how Aristotle went to his grave asserting that men have more teeth than women. Based solely on the grounds that, "it stands to reason". What he never did, according to the story, was ask his wife to open her mouth so he could count her teeth. Aristotle was a theoritician, you see. He wasn't an experimentalist.
One factual case in which Aristotle erred was in the acceleration of two objects of different weight. Again, he applied inductive reasoning and because "it stands to reason", he determined that, of course, the heavier object would fall faster than the lighter object.
Aristotle died in 322 B.C. It wasn't until the early seventeenth century, call it one thousand, nine hundred fifty years (until 1628), just to have a nice round number, that Galileo Galilei began to question the validity of Aristotlean science. The story, also perhaps apocryphal, goes that he climbed the tower of Pisa and dropped a large and a small cannon ball from the top. And both hit the ground at the same time. Supposedly, when he repeated his experiment before other scientists of the day, they didn't believe what they had seen. They asked him how he had rigged the experiment to produce such false results[01].
And now, here we are, an additional three hundred seventy-five years later (2,325 years, all told) and people are still basing issues of socio-cultural import on Aristotlean reasoning. Of course the people who do that are uniformly unable to use proper logic. Their reasoning is universally based on logical fallacies, it seems to me, rather than on logic itself. I could excuse Aristotle for his failure to use proper logic on the grounds that the methodology of any new school of thought must be developed from scratch[02]. But the only excuse for that kind of thinking in this day and age when proper methodologies have been firmly established is invincible ignorance.
Along about now, such a person, assuming they have the attention span needed to read this far, is saying to his or herself that there are large numbers of studies about media violence that prove the harmful effects of violent media on children. Nope. There are not. They have all been debunked as universally flawed. Dr. Jonathan Freedman, a professor of psychology, did a critical review of the mass of media violence studies and determined that they were all useless. Fatally flawed on the grounds of flawed methodology and questionable conclusions, and some conclusions which were based on fraudulent data. Which review led to this conclusion by another student of media violence:
Politicians and psychologists cite thousands of studies that have, to use Rowell Huesmann's words, "provided incontrovertible evidence of the strong media-violence connection."Well, let me suggest again that the evidence for this vaunted connection is very controvertible. Whether we cite 100, 1,000, or 10,000 research studies which conclude that exposure to violent media produces violent behavior, 10,000 is no more persuasive or credible than 100, if the designs of the research are flawed and/or the generalizations to an external population of behaviors are patently unjustified.
--Stuart Fischoff, Psychology's Quixotic Quest For the Media-Violence Connection
Most of those studies, you see, do not study the affect of media violence on children so much as they study how children react to media violence studies in the laboratory. And quite frankly, I have to question the credibility of any study that says children show heightened levels of agression after watching Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. Furthermore, these studies do not seem to have taken other factors into account. Psychiatrist Maria Montessori once noted, in the first work she did with mentally handicapped children, that children explore the qualities of an object with specific patterns of behaviour. They would repeat a single action over and over again with that object until they had apparently assimilated the information about how the toy operated, and they would then put it aside. In one study of media violence, the children were shown some cartoons or shows on television, and then allowed to play with a bobo doll. This is an inflatable doll with a heavy weight in the bottom, so that knocking the doll over would result in it's popping right back up again. Researchers apparently encouraged the children to slap the doll and then recorded the results as data.
This behaviour on the part of the researchers correlated with the method by which children learn raises a number of questions:
The most serious objection I have to laboratory studies is simply that they do take place in the laboratory. A laboratory is necessary to some degree to create highly controlled situations, but violent behaviour does not generally take place in controlled situations. A psychology subject could be goaded into violence, but he cannot be allowed to inflict uncontrolled violence on his surroundings, because he could harm others or himself. Outside of a controlled environment, he can inflict any harm he desires, from simple incidents of road rage all the way to "Suicide by Cop". Under those conditions, however, you cannot study the subject as effectively as one might want.
One statistical analysis done from a 30 year longitudinal study was debunked because it apparently did not take into account all of the data and some factors that might have had an influence on the study group. That can be corrected for, but a statistical analysis still cannot answer the question of how much influence violent games and programming has had on the criminals.
Okay. So what is the solution to these problems? How can we determine what influence violence has on the socialization of the young toward violent behaviour? We can't. The solution to these problems is not a feasible one.
Here is what we need to do.
We will have to select at random a fairly large number of children from birth to ensure that there is no previous influence on them. Measures should be taken to ensure that they form a cross section of society. One group, a control group, will grow up free of exterior influence. The remainder will have to be subjected to a number of differing influences and combinations of differing influences. They should, ideally, remain in the home and never be apprised of the fact that they are subjects in a psychological experiment. Just as Jim Carrey's character in the film The Truman Show.
They must be allowed to grow up as much as possible in the mainstream except for the influences toward violent behaviour, and allowed to interact completely with society at large. Naturally, the judicial system will not be aware of this experiment either, or at least not know who is or how many are involved, so as not to be influenced in sentencing.
In short: wind them up and turn them loose.
Allow the experiment to run for long enough to collect a representative sampling of data, say thirty years, then study the data to identify failures in methodology. Correct the methodology, run the program a second time, and then further refine the methodology. Run it again. We should be able to consider the data from the third run as reliable and admissible.
Have you followed me this far? Great. Here are the objections to why we cannot do such a thing.
So, there you have it. The Truman Show Solution to the question of media violence. If you do decide to run such a program, be sure to let me know how it goes. By mail; not in person. I'll look forward to hearing from you in about a hundred years, and don't forget to show your work.
[Addendum (17 Dec 2005:) On 13 Dec 2005, Douglas Lee had a commentary posted at First Amendment Center web site tited Lack of scientific evidence short-circuits video-game bans. In it he examines how the lack of sound evidence for backing up the claim of a causal relationship of "Harmful To Minors" materials render such legislations unconstitutional. --MN]
[Addendum (11 May 2006:) On 07 May, Paul K. McMasters had a commentary titled Watch out for studies about TV harming kids. Much of it is a rehash of old arguments, but he raised some new points which parallel some of those that I make here. --MN]
FOOTNOTES:
[01] These were probably the same people who looked through his telescope and denied seeing any of the moons of Jupiter. This story is factual, but I do not know the circumstances of the denial. They might have turned a blind eye to the existance of the moons because the idea of moons around another planet that was orbiting Earth was simply so incredible, or they might have been mindful of the inquisition and denied having seen anything when put to the Question. Or to
avoid being put to the Question.
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[02] When Doctor Alfred Kinsey first began his studies in sexology, he ran some analyses of the incidence of homosexuality in the general populations. Ultra-right wing nuts showered shit and derision in all directions at the idea that ten percent of the population was homosexual. When his methodology was called into question it was subjected to a rigorous review, which found out that his methodolgy was surprising accurate. This is part and parcel of the scientific
process. Ultra-right wing nuts, however, tend to use the existence of previous, flawed methodologies to discredit information gathered under current, corrected methodologies.
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[03] And can you just imagine the law suits once the public found out?
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11 Jul 2003
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