​50 years of research on TV violence and little progress

In its Jan. 1 issue, the journal Nature looked back at what ran on its pages 50 years ago this week. Some of it sounds eerily familiar.

A study on the effects of television violence concluded: "On the whole the weight of evidence is behind the conclusion that the heavy dosage of violence in the mass media, while not a major determinant of crime or delinquency, heightens the probability that someone in the audience will act aggressively in a later situation."

Researchers in the mid-fifties were looking at a very different screen than the ones we watch today. A study published around the same time by the National Council of Teachers of English surveyed children's reactions to series such as "Hopalong Cassidy" and "Lone Ranger," a far cry from the zombie shows and first person shooter video games of today. But the findings haven't changed nearly as much.

One study, in 2011, found that kids who play violent video games become desensitized to guts and gore and that they are more prone to aggressive behavior, much as the Nature paper said in 1965.

Other than that, no study has been able to draw a convincing link. And one analysis published in November in the Journal of Communication, found an overarching lack of correlation stretching all the way back to the 1940s.

The Television and Research Committee was formed in the U.K. in 1963 to, as the Nature reprint recalls, "initiate and coordinate research into the part which television plays, or could play, as a medium of communication and in fostering attitudes." Yet here we are in the U.S. more than five decades hence, asking the same questions over and over again.