Desensitization And Normalization

In Brad J. Bushman and Craig A. Anderson’s Research Report Comfortably numb, there are three factors that effect the actions taken by an individual that encounters a victim and decides to help. The factors are—the individual must be notice or attend the violent incident, the individual must recognize the event as an emergency, and feel the responsibility to aid the victim. According to Figure 1, provided the convincing evidence of two studies, one in which participants played violent video games while completing a lengthy questionnaire; they were exposed to hearing a commotion of a loud fight outside the lab. The fight had resulted in an injury, but it was noted that those participants who were playing the violent video games at the time were
It has become evident that the data provided by these two studies is convincing to the notion that violent media desensitizes people from the suffering of others. Desensitization is a major factor in stopping an individual who is encountered with a victim from helping said victim. The individual who is desensitized may be less likely to notice the victim, have a reduced perception of seriousness injury or emergency, and decreased sympathy for the victim—as a result of normalized violence. The studies provided were testing the cognitive and numbing effects of media violence. The desensitizing procedures were the exposures to the media violence. This exposure is to initially feared stimuli in a positive context emotionally. The desensitizing effect is the lack of fear/anxiety in the reactions toward violence—such as decreases heart rate. As a cognitive effect, there were several outcomes: decreases perception of injury, decreased attention to violent event, decrease in sympathy, self-normalized violence, and the decrease of negative attitudes towards violence. Ultimately, these cognitive affects have the
The participants had an opportunity to help a young women with a wrapped ankle who drops a crutch. A researcher had a hidden stopwatch to determine the time it took participants to help the confederate. The researcher flipped a coin to determine weather the staged incident would occur before or after the film. This allowed for the researcher to test the control, and the helpfulness of people at the theater attending violent v. non violent movies. The confederate dropped her crutch 36 times—9 in each experiment condition. The data was then analyzed in a model showing the mean time elapsed before adults helped the confederate weather they watched the movie before or after the violent or non-violent film. As a result, participants who had viewed the violent movie took over 26% longer to help the lady than those participants in the other three experimental conditions. Another interesting result is that women helped out less than the