British Children and Televised Violence

Is the frequency of watching television programs with recurrentviolent themes positively related to aggressive attitudes amongyoung people? This study of a sample of British school childrenyields findings very similar to U.S. data, in terms of bothdirection and magnitude of the relationship. It also examinesthe influence of program type and demographic variables on thatrelationship.     

Influence of an Anonymous Stranger on a Routine Decision to Act or Not to Act: An Experiment in Conformity*

The purpose of the study was to investigate the impact of law-adhering and law-violating contexts on subject-behavior in a potentially law-violating situation in which the probability of negative sanctions was slight. Observations were made on subjects who had to make a decision either to violate or to adhere to a “Don't-Walk’ signal at the intersection with sparse traffic. The three specific conditions included the control-condition in which no model was present and the experimental conditions in which an anonymous male stranger, the experimenter's confederate, acted either as a law-adhering model or as a law-violating model. The presence of a law-adhering model significantly increases the rate of pedestrian-adherence to a minor legal restriction on the part of both males and females. After the ceiling effects arising from the design of the experiment were factored out, the results showed that a law-violating model has greater influence on subject-behavior than the law-adhering model does. In both the law-adhering and the law-violatin contexts, the model influences the behavior of females slightly more than he does the behavior of males.