We examined whether violent media exposure would be associated with increased aggression, which would then spread within social networks like a contagious disease

Violent media use and aggression: Two longitudinal network studies. Martin Delhove &Tobias Greitemeyer. The Journal of Social Psychology, Mar 30 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2021.1896465

Abstract: Exposure to violent media has been widely linked to increased aggression. In the present research, we examined whether violent media exposure would be associated with increased aggression, which would then spread within social networks like a contagious disease. Two groups of first year psychology students completed a questionnaire three times over the course of a year, measuring their media exposure, aggression, personality, and social relations within the group. Cross-sectional analysis provided mixed results in regards to the link between violent media and aggression. Siena analysis found no evidence of homophily (i.e., participants were not more likely to be friends with others similar to themselves) nor of social influence (i.e., participant’s behavior did not predict a change in their friends’ behavior). However, given the relatively small sample sizes and the weak ties between participants, more work is needed to assess the spread of violent media effects.

KEYWORDS: Video gamesviolent mediaaggressionsocial networklongitudinalSiena

General discussion

The present work had three main goals. First, we aimed at replicating the link between violent media exposure and increased aggression, bringing new evidence in the current debate within media psychology. Second, we tried the case for homophily, the preference of individuals toward befriending others alike to themselves, in the context of aggression and media consumption. Third, and most importantly, we meant to test the recent claim that violent-media-related aggression could spread from consumers to their close ones (e.g., Greitemeyer, 2018).

Cross-sectional results provided mixed support for the link between violent media use and aggressive outcomes. In Study 1, the relationship between violent media use and aggressive behavior and trait aggression was not consistent. In Study 2, higher consumption of aggressive media was linked to the perception of aggressive behavior as more socially normative, but anger and aggressive behavior did not relate to violent media use. Across all six time points of the two studies, neutral media use related frequently to the different measures of aggressive outcomes, suggesting that frequency of media use, rather than the actual violent content one is exposed to, relates to some aspects of aggression. The longitudinal social network analyses did not support our hypotheses either. Homophily did not appear to influence the creation and continuation of relationships when looking at media use and aggression. Moreover, we could not find signs of social influence, be it on aggressive behaviors or norms about aggression. Overall, we did not find violent media to have a longitudinal effect on aggression.

Limitations

As any work, the present research has several limitations. One of which concerns our samples. We may have lacked a sufficient sample size in order to uncover some of the effects. After exclusions, we had at most 137 participants filling our questionnaire for one time point. Assuming p < .05, the effect size we could detect with a power of .8 was r = .24. Recent meta-analyses in the context of violent video game (Anderson et al., 2010; Greitemeyer & Mügge, 2014) have estimated the effect size at r = .19, which could even be an over-estimation (Hilgard et al., 2017). Hence, even with our best cross-sectional analysis, we were lacking sufficient power.

Unfortunately, because we conducted the study over the course of two following years, there are some potential overlap between participants in Study 1 and 2, meaning that we could not conduct an integrated data analysis to improve our statistical power. Adding to this, we had a high turn-over with only slightly over half of our participants completing all three data collection phases in both studies, hindering the capacity of our Siena analysis to establish the actual effects present in our networks.

Moreover, the use of students as participants in research has been criticized (Peterson, 2001; but see Druckman & Kam, 2009). Most importantly for the present context, participants in our study indicated that the ties to the fellow students were not very close. In fact, our participants did not know each other before data collection started, that is, all of the ties consisted of newly acquainted individuals. Our hope was that by selecting a recently formed network, we would be able to observe the creation of stronger ties as the year went by, giving us an opportunity to evaluate the many changes that would appear as students started to know each other. Although we observed stronger ties at later time points (see Tables 2 and 5) this may not have been sufficient or we may have needed to continue data collection at a later time, once our participants had the opportunity to form more significant friendships. Given that individuals are most strongly affected by their relatives and close friends (Christakis & Fowler, 2009), future work examining the impact of stronger relationships on the spread of aggressive media-related aggression might support the social influence hypothesis.

Adding to this, the specific use of psychology students may be problematic when studying aggression. Indeed, research on the differences in personality among study majors found, among other things, that psychology students tended to score higher on agreeableness (Vedel, 2016) and lower on dark triad traits (Vedel & Thomsen, 2017) than some of the other majors, especially economics or business students. This could be part of an explanation as to the low scores we found on reported aggressive behaviors and norms. Replications using a different sample would be beneficial in the future.

Finally, although it is a great tool for social network analysis, RSiena cannot make use of the whole data we collected. As we have previously stated, behavioral dynamics of continuous variables cannot be implemented yet. In combination with the aforementioned low variance in our aggressive behavior measurement, we could have failed to find some patterns that are actually present in our sample. Another piece of information that would have been beneficial for a more precise model in the future is the relationship type. As stated above, one is more likely to be influenced by those who are closer to her/him. That is, acquaintances typically have a much lesser impact than one’s best friend. Hopefully, future improvements of Siena will allow testing of more complex models in the future, which could shed a new light on works like ours.

Future perspectives

The present work provides some insight on how media use and aggression interact in human networks. However, there are still many things to explore in this field. In the following, we present some ideas that we deem interesting for future works.

First of all, aggression is manifold, and studies on the effect of violent media took interest in many different outcomes. Potential measures of interest include hostile expectation bias (Bushman & Anderson, 2002) or desensitization to violence (Bartholow et al., 2006). Similarly, in light of Vachon et al.’s (2014) finding that empathy and aggression are only weakly related, one may want to use more sound measures of empathy (i.e., by using measures which also include dissonant responses such as sadism or schadenfreude) to explore its role in the context of violent media use in society. As a matter of fact, everyday sadism (Greitemeyer, 2015) and dark personality (Delhove & Greitemeyer, 2020) have been found to relate to violent video game use. Furthermore, based on the correlations between neutral media use and some of our aggression measures, it would be pertinent to compare the effects of violent content and of overall frequency of media consumption on aggression.

Another promising direction could emerge from exploring the effect of prosocial games on prosocial behaviors. An example of such effect stems from the work of Greitemeyer and Osswald (2009, 2010). These authors asked their participants to play either a prosocial or a neutral video game and found that prosocial games decreased hostile expectation biases and the accessibility of antisocial thoughts as well as increased prosocial behaviors and the accessibility of prosocial thoughts. Outside of a laboratory setting, Prot et al. (2014) conducted a large-scale, cross-cultural correlational study and a two-year longitudinal study. They found that prosocial media use was linked to higher levels of helping behaviors which was mediated by increased empathy. Meta-analysis of prosocial video game use found that this effect was of a similar magnitude as that of violent video game use (Greitemeyer & Mügge, 2014). We would suggest that future work also delve into the eventual spread of positive effects of prosocial media.