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Do violent movies cause violent crime?
No, at least not in the short run. Rambo gets the bad guys off the streets. And for a while they even seem to calm down:
What is the short-run impact of media violence on crime? Laboratory experiments in psychology find that exposure to media violence increases aggression. In this paper, we provide field evidence on this question. We exploit variation in violence of blockbuster movies between 1995 and 2002, and study the effect on same-day assaults. We find that violent crime decreases on days with higher theater audiences for violent movies. The effect is mostly driven by incapacitation: between 6PM and 12AM, an increase of one million in the audience for violent movies reduces violent crime by 1.5 to 2 percent. After the exposure to the movie, between 12AM and 6AM, crime is still reduced but the effect is smaller and less robust. We obtain similar, but noisier, results using data on DVD and VHS rentals. Overall, we find no evidence of a temporary surge in violent crime due to exposure to movie violence. Rather, our estimates suggest that in the short-run violent movies deter over 200 assaults daily. We discuss the endogeneity of releases. Potential interpretations for our results include a cathartic effect of movies, displacement of crime, and decrease in alcohol consumption. The differences with the experimental results may be due to experimental procedures, or to sorting into violent movies. Our design does not allow us to estimate long-run effects.
Here is the full paper.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on October 23, 2006 at 07:24 AM in Film, Law | Permalink
Comments
Perhaps economists should be looking for the Jack Bauer effect -- does police brutality go up after violent movies are released? Do cops get more violent after watching movies that feature cops as gun slinging enforcers of justice?
Posted by: Rafe at Oct 23, 2006 10:34:52 AM
If violent mvoies "caused" crime, then the Japanese would have one of the highest crime rates in the world. Instead they have one of the very lowest, for all I know the actual lowest.
Interesting thought though that it may reduce violent crime, if only because some of the most violent people may be chilling in the theater watching the movie. Or maybe it really does have a cathartic effect as otherwise violent people have some safe fun, but I vote for the substitute effect on time.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Oct 23, 2006 11:11:07 AM
I think it's true that all culture comes into existence to defer violence. By substituting signs, or representations, for real things we avoid immediate competition over scarce worldly objects. However, in so producing signs we also increase the level of conscious desire that has to be deferred by the world of signs. And since in time any sign will lose its power, if there are not new signs to take the place of those that no longer have a hold over us, real violence can erupt (often along the lines of the old myths about the gods that we have now assimilated to human worldly actions).
Thus it's easy to accept a study that violent movies defer violence in the short term. But as the study asks, what about the long term? It suggests there must be a continual progression of new, and likely ever more violent, movies, to defer the violent desire that movies themselves help engender - we must recognize the paradox that a violent movie will simultaneously both defer and increase desires - the desire, in the imagination, to have godly/filmic power over life and death. And while movies may generally defer violence, there will be times when we can show a direct link between a movie and a violent crime, a crime that would not have been committed in this shape or form if not for the movie on which it was modelled.
If movies have been one of the major tools by which twentieth-century Western civilization has deferred its violence, what happens when the possibilities for innovation in filmic violence run their course, in the progression from, say, Chaplin to Tarantino? New cultural forms will have to develop if society is to maintain its order. Hence we see Hollywood losing ever more of its business to gaming and the internet.
Likewise, if a religion cannot continually evolve to renew its connection to fundamental mysteries which act to humble us and defer our desires, then the religion becomes a dead end and should be allowed to die instead of being turned into a worldly political project.
Posted by: truepeers at Oct 23, 2006 1:12:51 PM
This paper is absurd. Perhaps the reason crime drops between the hours of
6 and 12 is because all the thugs are at the movie theatre sipping on their 5 dollar cokes.
Posted by: dude at Oct 23, 2006 4:42:33 PM
I think violence on tv and movies has increased violence tendencies within our society. I think this
experiment should be done with the youth until they are out of their teenage years because the younger
kids watching would be more likely renact a violent tendency when they are a little older. I also think
that more violence tendecies is being produced but just on a less significant perspective such as
kids hitting their parents, or fighting sibilings or friends. These may not be crimes but movies
and television deifintely have an impact on our youth. The youth simply mimics their role models so this
idea is legitimate.
Posted by: Brandon Walker at Oct 23, 2006 7:22:58 PM
People amaze me about this issue. Perhaps no social science issue is so commonly misunderstood or so illogically defended. See the Science article if you are really interested in learning about the history of research on the link between media violence exposure and aggressive outcomes. It's a brief but helpful summary. The article under consideration here suffers from some very troubling problems on its own. First, as can be seen from the Science article, the authors could not have summarized the available evidence on the subject of causation more poorly. Perhaps they should expand their searching to, I don't know, the field of mass communication. I'm just spit-balling here. That literature does not entirely exist in psychology, but rather communication. Second, David Phillip's interesting epidemiological analyses found effects 3-5 days following the natural intervention. This warrants attention in the present article but gets none in the analysis. Why? Third, of course, it's hard to throw stones at the house of causation and then perform a non-experiment. Interpreting cause from this type of study is risky because the potentially spurious third variables are 1) impossible to mete out, and 2) not well conceived or estimated. I might also add that the authors seem to reason and write using their statistical techniques like a 16-year old would drive if handed the keys to a new Corvette. The analyses are well conceived but are not a link to causation by themselves. Statistical analyses help us sort out data. They do not trump Mill's canons of temporal precedence or nonspuriousness. Thus, the drivers should use caution in interpreting these results as evidence that conflicts with the preponderandce of field,lab experiments and longitudinal studies (featuring cross-lags) that point convincingly to the proposition that media violence has both short and long term effects on a variety of aggressive outcomes. For the other bloggers, note that catharsis has not been evidenced since 1968 (Feschbach) and that controlling for cultural differences between such diverse nations is harder than reading fitting a video-tape of XXX into a DVD player.
Posted by: Medviolenceisn'tallitiscrackeduptonotobe at Oct 24, 2006 1:13:49 PM
I would have to say that i think violent movies and T.v shows do cause people to act differently,
for example my brother use to love to watch wrestling, and after the match was over he would always come
to my room and try out the moves he just saw on me. I know after i go and see an action flick when i get
out i normally am in a different state of mind then i was when I went went into the movie. So overall i
think that what people in the movies or watch on t.v. or even listen to, do play a huge part in the way
that they behave.
Posted by: AIngle at Oct 25, 2006 3:54:09 PM
I believe that violence in movies does affect violent crimes in our societies. For example, the movie "The Matrix" had lots of action scenes dealing with gun fights against the bad guys and the good guys. The Columbine High School shooting was a good example of this movie. The two shooters were high school students that dressed up in trench coats like in the movie. Is this a coincidence? maybe, but I believe that it was directly related.
Posted by: Kendra at Oct 25, 2006 4:19:41 PM
I'm going to have to side with dude on this one. While I've always suspected that violent media attracts violent people rather than causing violence itself, I don't see anything in the paper to indicate a causal relationship. They do have surprisingly strong correlation, but I suspect that the overall trends would be the same when comparing those same hours on non-release days as well.
I wonder if a similar relationship could be found with the release of violent games? Perhaps not, since the consumption of games is spread out according to the user's whims in the same manner as DVD and VHS usage.
Posted by: MattM at Oct 25, 2006 5:47:21 PM
Without having read the paper: This seems stupid. Of course violent movies reduce violence when the movie is literally in the theaters -- people who are attracted to violence in real life might be busy seeing the movie and have less time to mug someone. But what if they then become more violent in the months that follow? Or years?
Posted by: Anono at Oct 26, 2006 12:50:50 AM
Yes it gives a tendency to do that
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Posted by: hoojk at Dec 2, 2007 8:45:27 PM
Yes violence do sometime affect crime you have some movie where it does invole the good guys to take the bad guys off the street but what about if kids play games and find a gun that belongs to their parent and play Robo cop or something and the trigger go off. What about kids who are being bullied go get a gun and think it's right foro them to take the life of a kid who been bulling everyone. You don't think movie have a big effect on teenagers. PPeople who want to be superman and Spider man and bat man I believe violence have alot to do with society and how people react towards it.
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