Do films and games make us violent?

There is, and I suspect always will be, a debate about what effects the individual and what is responsible for their behaviour. The world seems to fall into two schools that we usually describe as nature and nurture. The issue is, are we effected by events?, or are we effected by our response to those events?

That brings us neatly to the subject of this weeks podcast which was about whether or not we are effected by watching violence on screen, does it change our behaviour and does it make us more violent?

My simple response would be that in some cases observing violence can make us more violent either through the need for revenge or through desensitisation towards violent acts. There can also be a general desensitisation to the morals or ‘right and wrong’ that goes with the habitual experience of negative behaviours. When we desensitise acts that we would have previously seen as wrong they become common place and normal. There has been enough research on the concentration camps in world war two for us to see what happened to the guards and how they normalised their behaviour so that running a death camp became normal.

We can also see in families how abuse, both violent and sexual, is carried from one generation to the next through the normalisation of observation and habitual experience.

In neuropsychology we know that the Brain changes and develops in response to new learning and that learning is mainly visual. We also know that the brain cannot tell the difference between whether we are actually doing something, observing it or imagining it. They all have the same effect on the brain. People watch horror movies because they experience the thrill of the fear. However, they have the luxury to get up at the end of the movie and get on with their lives.

This relationship between what we observe, how it effects our brain and how we subsequently act begins to explain how visual media, video/internet games and internet porn, directly effect out attitudes and our behaviour.

One of the motivations for this episode was the fact that I had been talking to a sexual support worker who told me that in a large class of adolescent girls who were asked do they expect sex to be painful there was a 100% ‘yes’. This was either from experience or from what they had observed viewing internet porn. The issue and attitudes are from the fact that the girls had learned that sex was something that would be, or is, being done ‘to’ them and not something done ‘with’ them. An act of submission and not an act of equal expression.

When we examine our own attitudes in any aspect of life and consider where they came from we begin to realise that we are the habits that we have learned from birth. People keep saying to me “this is just the way I am” and I am forever saying ‘no, this is the way that you have learned to be’.

It is easy to see and understand where the desensitisation to sexual sensitivity or generalised violence comes from. The bit that is not explained is where is the moral compass, the teaching and the direction that takes us to more equality of loving and nurture. The bottom line is that previous moral steering that came from religions of various shades across the world has fallen into disrepute. Less and less people are attending places of worship. Where now is the ‘love your neighbour’?

Politically we see Trump, Putin, May, North Korea, and so on shouting a creed of violence and vengeance. We have the ‘us’ and ‘them’ syndrome that desensitises us. When the concentration camp guides made the Jews into ‘them’ and decided that they were not human beings only animals it made their behaviours acceptable to them.

When see any group of people as less than ourselves then we have rights and powers over them and we can use this as our justification to treat them as we will.

We learn by what we observe. If we involve our self in real or virtual images and experiences of physical violence and sexual violence everyday it becomes the normal. If we see women being used as sexual utensils for long enough we desensitise and normalise. If we take Jews off to the gas chamber everyday we desensitise and normalise.

All these things are true until something else happens to wake us up to our behaviour. It may be a teacher telling us to love our neighbour as our self, to nurture and care for our family, to forgive, let go and live in peace.

In a world where the things that we think about we bring about we need to be mindful of what we are feeding our minds and emotions. Good images equal happy mind.

Be happy be mindful, be sensitive and be loving

Take care

Sean x