What do psychologists think about the effects of violent video games and violence in the media on viewers? Does it lead people to be more aggressive? More violent? Or is it the other way around - that aggressive people are drawn to violent media? We explore this question in this episode along with taking a close look at the classic “Bobo” doll study that was conducted by Albert Bandura. And we throw in a little James Bond along the way.

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Resources For This Episode

• Here’s the article that appeared in the Stanford News Service which announces the Grawemeyer Award that was given to Albert Bandura.
• Albert Bandura’s website.
• Here’s a version of Bandura’s original article on the effects of observing aggressive models which I found on Google Scholar.
• Forty Studies that Changed Psychology: Explorations into the History of Psychological Research
• Bully
• Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror
• The Rodney Atkins - Watching You video on YouTube

Here’s the video from YouTube called “Watching You”:


Technorati: bobo doll study, albert bandura, video game violence, violence in the media, media violence, classic bobo doll study

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 Episode 37: The Effects of Video Game and Media Violence [27:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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What happens when people “marry outside their looks” (that is, when you marry someone who is obviously much more attractive than you are)? There’s an interesting and humorous article on page 86 of the May 7, 2007 issue of Time magazine that discusses just this. The title is “The Last Taboo”. Or, as the author puts it, “Marrying a few degrees up or down the hotness scale.” Recall that part of episode 4 (”On Birds Flocking and Opposites Attracting”) is about what psychologists often refer to as the matching hypothesis - the observation that we all seem to have a sense of how attractive we are and how attractive other people are and we tend to marry people who we deem to be at about our same “level”.

Here are a couple other examples of seeming mismatches:

• They’re now divorced but Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett

• Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt

• Dennis Kucinich and his wife Elizabeth Jane (Harper) Kucinich

Here is the link to episode 4 which discusses the matching hypothesis in more detail.

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