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"Behavioral
Psychology"
Conditioning
Kids To Kill
Thus the tremendous impact of psychological "conditioning"
to overcome the resistance to killing can be observed in
Vietnam and the Falklands where it gave US and British units
a tremendous tactical advantage in close combat, increasing
the firing rate from the World War II baseline of around
20% to over 90% in these wars.
Through
violent programming on television and in movies, and through
interactive point-and-shoot video games, the developed nations
are indiscriminately introducing to their children the same
weapons technology that major armies and law enforcement
agencies around the world use to "turn off" the midbrain
"safety catch" that Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall discovered
in World War II.
US
Bureau of Justice Statistics research indicates that law
enforcement officers and veterans (including Vietnam veterans)
are statistically less likely to be incarcerated than a
nonveteran of the same age. The key safeguard in this process
appears to be the deeply ingrained discipline that the soldier
and police officer internalize with their training. However,
by saturating children with media violence as entertainment,
and then exposing them to interactive "point-and-shoot"
arcade and video games, it has become increasingly clear
that society is aping military conditioning, but without
the vital safeguard of discipline.
The same sort of discipline that sets boundaries for members
of the military is also part of the hunting subculture,
the other sector of society that is familiar with guns.
In this environment there are: strict rules about not pointing
guns at people, extreme cautions regarding the safety of
individuals, and often even respect for their prey, all
of which hunters pass on as part of their socialization
process and which are reinforced by strict laws. Video game
players are not instilled with the same values.
The observation that violence in the media is causing violence
in our streets is nothing new. The American Academy of Pediatrics,
the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical
Association, and their equivalents in many other nations
have all made unequivocal statements about the link between
media violence and violence in our society. The APA, in
their 1992 report Big World, Small Screen, concluded that
the "scientific debate is over." And in 1993 the APA's commission
on violence and youth concluded that "there is absolutely
no doubt that higher levels of viewing violence on television
are correlated with increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes
and increased aggressive behavior." The evidence is, quite
simply, overwhelming.
Dr. Brandon Centerwall, professor of epidemiology at the
University of Washington, has summarized the overwhelming
nature of this body of evidence. His research demonstrates
that, anywhere in the world that television is introduced,
within 15 years the murder rate will double. (And across
15 years the murder rate will significantly underrepresent
the problem because medical technology developments will
be saving ever more lives each year.)
Centerwall
concludes that if television had never been introduced in
the United States, then there would today be 10,000 fewer
homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes,
and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults. Overall violent crime
would be half what it is. He notes that the net effect of
television has been to increase the aggressive predisposition
of approximately 8% of the population, which is all that
is required to double the murder rate. Statistically speaking
8% is a very small increase. Anything less than 5% is not
even considered to be statistically significant. But in
human terms, the impact of doubling the homicide rate is
enormous.
There
are many psychological and sociological processes through
which media violence turns into violent crime. From a developmental
standpoint we know that around the age of 18 months a child
is able to discern what is on television and movies, but
the part of their mind that permits them to organize where
information came from does not fully develop until they
are between ages five and seven. Thus, when a young child
sees someone shot, stabbed, beaten, degraded, abused, or
murdered on the screen, for them it is as though it were
actually happening. They are not capable of discerning the
difference, and the effect is as though they were children
of a war zone, seeing death and destruction all around them,
and accepting violence as a way of life.
From
a Pavlovian, or classical conditioning standpoint, there
is what Dave Grossman has termed the Reverse-Clockwork Orange
process. In the movie, Clockwork Orange, a sociopath is
injected with a drug that makes him nauseous and he then
is exposed to violent movies. Eventually he comes to associate
all violence with nausea and is somewhat "cured" of his
sociopathy. In real life millions of children are exposed
to thousands of repetitions of media violence, which they
learn to associate with not nausea but pleasure in the form
of their favorite candy, soda, and a girlfriend's perfume
as they sit and laugh and cheer at vivid depictions of human
death and suffering.
Finally, from a behavioral perspective, the children of
the industrialized world participate in countless repetitions
of point-and-shoot video and arcade games that provide the
motor skills necessary to turn killing into an automatic,
reflexive, "kerplunk" response, but without the stimulus
discriminators and the safeguard of discipline found in
military and law enforcement conditioning.
Thus,
from a psychological standpoint, the children of the industrialized
world are being brutalized and traumatized at a young age,
and then through violent video games (operant conditioning)
and media violence (classical conditioning) they are learning
to kill and learning to like it. The result of this interactive
process is a worldwide virus of violence.
A hundred things can convince the forebrain to take gun
in hand and go to a certain point: poverty, drugs, gangs,
leaders, radical politics and the social learning of violence
in the media. But traditionally all of these influences
have slammed into the resistance that a frightened, angry
human being confronts in the midbrain. With the exception
of violent sociopaths (who, by definition, do not have this
resistance) the vast, vast majority of circumstances are
not sufficient to overcome this midbrain safety net. But,
if you are conditioned to overcome these midbrain inhibitions,
then you are a walking time bomb, a pseudo-sociopath, just
waiting for the random factors of social interaction and
forebrain rationalization to put you in the wrong place
at the wrong time.
An effective analogy can be made to AIDS in attempting to
communicate the impact of this technology. AIDS does not
kill people, it destroys the immune system and makes the
victim vulnerable to death by other factors. The "violence
immune system" exists in the midbrain, and conditioning
in the media creates an "acquired deficiency" in this immune
system, resulting in what Grossman has termed "Acquired
Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome" or AVIDS. As a result
of this weakened immune system, the victim becomes more
vulnerable to violence enabling factors such as: poverty,
discrimination, drugs, gangs, radical politics and the availability
of guns. In behavioral terms this indiscriminate use of
combat conditioning techniques on children is the moral
equivalent of giving an assault weapon to every child in
every industrialized nation in the world. If, hypothetically,
this were done, the vast, vast majority of children would
almost certainly not kill anyone with their assault rifles;
but if only a tiny percentage did, then the results would
be tragic, and unacceptable. It is increasingly clear that
this is not a hypothetical situation. Indiscriminate civilian
application of combat conditioning techniques as entertainment
has increasingly been identified as a key factor in worldwide,
skyrocketing violent crime rates. Between 1957 and 1992
aggravated assault in the United States, according to the
FBI, went up from around 60 per 100,000 to over 440 per
100,000. Between 1977 and 1986 the "serious assault" rate,
as reported to Interpol:
-
Increased nearly fivefold in Norway and doubled in Greece,
the murder rate more than tripled in Norway and doubled
in Greece.
- In
Australia and New Zealand the "serious assault" rate increased
approximately fourfold, and the murder rate approximately
doubled in both nations.
- During
the same period the assault rate tripled in Sweden, and
approximately doubled in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England-Wales,
France, Hungary, Netherlands, Scotland, and the United
States; while all these nations (with the exception of
Canada) also had an associated (but smaller) increase
in murder.
All of these increases in violent crime, in all of these
nations, (which Dave Grossman has termed a virus of violence)
occurred during a period when medical and law enforcement
technology should have been bringing murder and crime rates
down. It is no accident that this has been occurring primarily
in industrialized nations, since the factor that caused
all of these increases is the same factor that caused a
revolution in close combat, except in this case it is the
media, not the military, that has been conditioning kids
to kill.
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1999 by Academic Press. All rights of reproduction in any
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