Media violence experts shun FTC seminar - Letter

Letter to US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) by Professor Craig Anderson & Professor L. Rowell Huesmann

(reprinted with permission)

October 22, 2003

After much thought and discussion with colleagues, we have decided that we both must decline your invitation to participate in the October 29, 2003 FTC workshop on "Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children and Industry Self-regulation." You state on the FTC webpage that during the workshop "There also will be an overview of the research on the effects of violent media on children." The workshop, as you have designed it may do many things, but it is not going to provide the public with any reasonable scientific overview of the research on the effects of violent media.

During the workshop day you have scheduled only one event where there might be a discussion of the research on violent media - a panel discussion in the afternoon. However, both the format of that panel discussion and the composition of that panel will prevent any reasonably accurate exposition of the deleterious effects that media violence has on children. Your request that we limit our comments to 5 minutes and do not discuss the large body of research on this topic conducted before 2000 because they are "old studies that have pretty much been argued out" strikes us as absurd, and your question about whether there are ways research might be directed in the future to "resolve or narrow the debate" reveals an ignorance of the fact that the vast majority of the scientific community in this area believes the debate has been resolved. Furthermore, your decision to give equal representation on the panel to a criminologist who has no significant record of research on media violence or on violent behavior (Dr. Savage) and to a writer whose book arguing that media violence has no effect was paid for by the Motion Picture Producers Association (Dr. Freedman) is bound to create an atmosphere in which science would lose. While we have great respect for the scholarly record and integrity of the proposed chair of the panel, Professor Delbert Elliott, he also is not a researcher on media violence. We could provide and have previously provided to congress and the government accurate summaries of what the scientific community has learned about the deleterious effects of media violence; however, we see no opportunity to do that during this workshop or panel which is bound to deteriorate into contentious arguments. We believe our presence would only lend credibility to a event that cannot have scientific validity with its format. In fact, our impression is that the format of the workshop has been created with the deliberate purpose of creating a public impression that self-regulation of violent media is working fine and that the effects of violent media are uncertain. We could not disagree more with that view.

Recently we have witnessed a distressing trend in public policy forums on media violence that can perhaps best be described as an "all opinions are equally valid" approach to scientific analysis. Such inclusiveness may be laudable in domains involving personal values or political opinions. However, the reason society increasingly turns to science is to discover empirical facts, not to evaluate opinions. Of course, within science there can be considerable divergence of opinion concerning the "facts" of a particular domain of science. And such scientific debate is legitimate among legitimate experts in that domain. And if there are legitimate experts in a domain that is considered relevant to public policy issues, then it is legitimate for public policy officials to seek out experts with differing views of that research domain. However, there is virtually no divergence of opinion among legitimate media violence experts concerning the basic factual question of most concern to the general public: Does exposure to violent entertainment media increase the likelihood of aggressive behavior by youthful consumers? The simple answer to this basic question is "yes," and we know of no legitimate media violence research experts who disagree with this statement. Indeed, this is one of the most well-researched, well-established findings in all of social and behavioral science. But for some reason, perhaps related to the successful lobbying efforts of the various entertainment industries themselves, public policy officials keep staging events in which a few legitimate media violence experts are pitted against illegitimate (but articulate) nonexperts, usually with the proclaimed goal of providing "balance."

Although we are not experts in physics, chemistry, or medicine, we suspect that such inappropriate attempts at "balancing" discussion of scientific issues is rare in those fields. If all the true research experts on neutrinos agreed on a particular neutrino-related scientific fact, it seems unlikely that a public policy debate would be staged with other physicists who have never actually studied neutrinos, but have merely read about others' studies and criticized them. Similarly, family practice physicians would not be called upon to rebut the scientific conclusions of biomedical scientists studying the effects of free radicals on the development of cancer. Of course, the medical domain is an interesting case in point precisely because of mistakes made by public policy makers and the news media over the debate about cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Long after the legitimate experts in this area had concluded that smoking caused increases in the likelihood of contracting lung cancer, "experts" who contradicted this conclusion (often in the employ of the tobacco industry) were found and publicized, thereby leading to a delay in recognition by the general public of the truth about the harmful effects of cigarettes and a corresponding delay in public health policy. The problem is even worse in the media violence debate, however. Several of the common "experts" trotted out by the media industry don't even have advanced training in a legitimate scientific discipline, let alone expertise in media violence research. In one recent conference panel on the effects of violent video games, one of the panel "experts" was an an historian who dismissed all behavioral science and proposed that an historical analysis of changes in the art of video games was a better way to discover their true effects on game players. This is worse than asking structural engineers for their expert opinions about the validity of a body of research created by genetic engineers; it is more like asking a member of the Flat Earth Society to evaluate the validity of NASA's claims to have landed U.S. astronauts on the moon. Obviously, these examples are more extreme than the panel you proposed, but not by as much as you might think.

Both of us have participated in so-called "balanced" symposia in the past. Most recently, one of us (Anderson, September 21-24, 2003) participated in the Australian government's Office of Rim and Literature Classification international ratings conference "Classification in a Convergent World." There was only one legitimate media violence researcher among the conference presenters, but there were three other "experts" whose primary function was, apparently, to denigrate all media violence research effects research conducted over the last 4O-some years. In addition, the U.S. video game industry's top PR representative was there to give a keynote address and to participate in another panel.

So, what constitutes a legitimate expert? We maintain that there are several minimal criteria. In an earlier note to you (email on the morning of October 16), one of us (Anderson) outlined the following criteria:

At minimum, it seems to me that to qualify as an expert in this domain one needs to: (a) have conducted original research on the effects of media violence exposure, i.e., gathered original data from research participants; (b) have several publications based on such original media violence effects research in top peer-reviewed scientific journals, such as Developmental Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; and (c) have an understanding and appreciation for all of the major research methods used, i.e., not categorically reject studies of any major type (experimental, cross sectional, longitudinal).

In short, someone who simply reads and analyzes others' work in this area is not sufficient evidence of expertise, in my view.

In your reply to that note, in which you first identified the other participants, you noted that they did not meet these criteria, a judgment with which we agree.

One might also ask why we believe that such a "balanced" approach to a public policy forum is of no value? We have slowly come to the realization that in such a context, scientific truth cannot emerge as the victor. It is much easier to criticize others' research than it is to explain why those criticism are invalid. This is especially true in the behavioral sciences, and especially when the audience members are not also research experts. It takes about 10 seconds to ridicule a laboratory measure of aggressive behavior, but at least 15 minutes to even briefly explain why that ridicule is misplaced. When both sides are given equal time (or as in Australia, where the "ridicule the research" side was given 4 times as much time), the best outcome that the legitimate researchers can hope for would be that a few in the audience would realize that there might be some valid research evidence that repeated exposure to violent media might be a problem. But overall, the message that gets received by most members of such audiences is that "experts" can't agree on whether or not there is evidence of negative effects. And this, of course, is exactly what the media industries want to achieve.

Finally, one should ask why it is so difficult to find a true expert who has a different view? Well, true experts do disagree on a number of fine points concerning media violence effects. But there is more consensus among true experts about the main point-that exposure to media violence does indeed increase the likelihood of aggressive behavior-than in almost any other behavioral/social science domain. That is why news reporters, the media industries, and public policy groups have to go so far outside the boundaries of true experts to find someone willing to harshly criticize existing research conclusions. That is also why six major U.S. health organizations issued a joint statement to Congress on the effects of media violence on children in the year 2000.

We apologize for this decision coming so late. But we feel that we were misinformed about the nature of this panel when first invited to participate, and our busy schedules made it extremely difficult for us to find time to communicate about this panel once we finally learned of the proposed composition (afternoon of October 16). We hope that we will be able to contribute our scientific expertise on media violence issues to the FTC in the future.

Sincerely,

Craig A. Anderson
Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology
Iowa State University

L. Rowell Huesmann
Professor of Communication Studies and Psychology
and Senior Research Professor, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan
Past President, International Society for Research on Aggression
Chair, Human Capital Initiative on Violence, 1994-97
Chair, Committee on Media Violence, Surgeon General's Report on Youth Violence, 2000