POW! ZAP! CRASH!
AGGRESSION IN COMIC BOOKS AND BIASES IN SOCIAL INFORMATION PROCESSING
ABSTRACT
It’s thought that violent media may have a negative impact on individuals functioning (Kirsh & Olczak, 2000). This study, which uses Extremely Violent Comic Books (EVCB) and Non-Violent Comic Books (NVCB) to prime aggressive networks, examines individuals’ interpretations of overt and relational ambiguous provocation stories. The study uses 128 subjects in a Between-Subjects design. The subjects are a convenience sample recruited from both a university setting and from on-line comic book message boards. The results indicate that long term exposure to comic books has no effect in the development of a Hostile Attribution Bias and that there are no differences between comic readers and non-comic readers’ personality variables. Earlier studies find that each gender perceives similar levels of violence but prefer different ones. In this study there were no signs of the classic effects predicted by this earlier research. What the data does support is the contention that short-term exposure to EVCB causes a short-term Hostile Attribution Bias. It’s found that aggression is affected by situational factors such as exposure to violent media and by Personological factors such as gender and trait hostility. Earlier work suggests that females reading EVCB respond more aggressively to relational ambiguous scenarios than males do. It’s also suggested that males reading EVCB responded more vigorously to ambiguous scenarios involving overt aggression. This study confirmed the high scores for females’ responses to relational scenarios but did not confirm the effect for males’ responses to overt scenarios. The study has problems with lack of variability of aggression response factors, sabotage, unrepresentative sampling and self selection bias. Solutions are proposed to make the experiment more efficient and potential areas for future research, particularly between specific personality factors and trait hostility, are suggested. The conclusion must be that whilst EVCB may cause aggression their effect is short-lived and there are no discernible long-term effects. Ultimately the processing of social information is related to Trait Hostility and Gender as well as exposure to violent media.