The PG-13 rating was introduced in 1984
to solve a financial problem for the film industry: Too many popular
films were being rated R, and an R rating meant that children under
17 could not attend unless accompanied by a parent or guardian.
According to the MPAA, a PG-13 film “may go beyong the PG rating in
theme, violence, nudity, sensuality, language, adult activities or
other elements, but does not reach the restricted R category.”
With respect to violence, they say, “There may be depictions of
violence in a PG-13 movie, but generally not both realistic and
extreme or persistent violence.” So, how's it going?
First, the methodology. Bushman drew
up a list of the 30 top-grossing films of each year from 1950 to 2012
(1890 films), from which they randomly selected half, or 945 films.
Trained coders watched the films and identified violent sequences,
defined as “physical acts where the aggressor makes or attempts to
make some physical contact with the intention of causing injury or
death.” This definition excludes natural disasters, accidents and
sports injuries. A sequence refers to the continuous action of a
character, regardless of the number of discrete acts in the sequence.
This solves an important practical problem, because it is not
necessary to count the exact number of violent acts, i.e., punches,
gunshots, which is a major source of unreliability in measuring
violence. Using this approach, they achieved a reliability of α
= .80, which is pretty good.
(I have very few questions about this
approach, but one problem that concerns me is the scoring of scenes
with large numbers of participants, such as battle scenes. Since
there is one violent sequence for each character, how do you measure
the number of participants? And how do you prevent such scenes from skewing the data?)
Next, they divided the films into
5-minute segments. The number of violent sequences in each segment
was counted, and each film was given a score representing the rate of
violent sequences per hour. In case you're wondering, 94% of all
films between 1950 and 2012 had at least one violent sequence.
Bushman also counted the number of
sequences involving guns, a gun being defined as “a weapon that can
be carried with one or both hands that fires a bullet or energy beam
with the intention of harming or killing a living target.” Hunting
and target shooting were excluded. The reliability in scoring these
sequences was even better (α
= .91). A violent scene involving a weapon is less ambiguous
than other forms of violence.
For purposes of analysis, films after
1984 were divided by rating into three categories: G and PG, PG-13
and R. G and PG were combined because there were fewer films with
these ratings among the box office hits.
First, Bushman looked at the overall trend from 1950 to 2012. Not surprisingly, there was an increase.
The level of violence more than doubled. The rate of increase was
not simply linear, but gradually accelerated over the 63-year period.
Then they looked at gun violence during
the period from 1984 to the present. Again, there was an increase,
but there were important differences by rating. The G- and PG-rated
films averaged 1.26 gun sequences per hour, and the overall rate
declined slightly. The R-rated films averaged 2.15 sequences per
hour and the rate did not change. However, violence in PG-13 films
increased significantly, more than tripling over the 29 years. It
started at near-zero, but accelerated sharply in recent years. From
2009-2012 the rate of gun violence was higher in PG-13-rated films
than in R-rated films, flatly contradicting the MPAA guidelines.
The study does not report any measures
of nudity or sexuality in films, but one of the co-authors, Daniel Romer, said that they measured sexuality, and it is much more
likely to get an R rating than violence. I presume these results
will appear in a future publication.
The relationship between filmed and
televised violence and aggressive behavior is one of the strongest
findings in social science, replicated in hundreds of experimental
and correlational studies. The American Psychological Association
and several other professional organizations have issued position
papers highlighting these findings and recommending public policy
changes. When you statistically combine the results of these studies
in a meta-analysis, the relationship between filmed violence and
aggressive behavior turns out to be almost as strong as that between smoking and lung cancer, and higher than many other statistical
relationships that society takes very seriously, i.e., exposure to
lead and IQ, homework and academic achievement. Exposure to media
violence also makes participants less likely to help a person in need.
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| Daniel Craig as the PG-13-rated James Bond |
Gun violence is a particular concern
due to the weapons effect. Experiments show that the mere presence
of a weapon—or a picture of a weapon—in the environment increases
aggressive behavior in both angry and non-angry participants, which
is probably why the presence of a gun in the home increases homicides.
While preparing this blog
entry, I read at least a dozen reports about Bushman's study in the
corporate media. Sadly, most of them contained false balancing (such
as this one and this one). That is, they “balanced” Bushman's findings with
comments from skeptics who dismissed the idea that violence in films
might influence real-world aggressive behavior. (Science Daily was a notable exception.) The most common argument was that
homicides have declined in this country in recent years, even as
filmed violence has increased. This reasoning is, of course,
completely fallacious, since there are many other variables that
influence the homicide rate.
False
balancing creates the mistaken impression that “experts disagree”
over whether gun violence in movies really matters. Considering the
popularity of violent films and television shows, this may be exactly
what their audience wants to hear. Bushman has recently written an article suggesting several ways people rationalize away these
findings. It is also worth noting that most of these news
organizations are owned by larger media corporations that profit
from the sale of filmed and televised violence. Bushman and Anderson have found that as the findings linking media violence and agression
have gotten stronger, the news media have become more assertive in
dismissing them.
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