Comic Books Kill?

It's common to hear that video games can lead to aggression in children, even murderous violence (just check out Anderson, Gentile and Buckley's recent review of the literature on video game effects to get a sense of the plausibility of this). But did you know that for the first half of the 20th century, it was comic books that were believed to be a plague on children's minds and morals? I'm looking forward to reading David Hajdu's new book, Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America. Slate also has a review of the book here, and a brief discussion of the censorship goals of the time.

It's easy, I think, to be immediately dismissive of things like the damaging effects of media, but reading Anderson, et al's book, I was struck by the gargantuan amounts of evidence from laboratory experiments of violent media causing aggression in children. The tests are usually not very realistic. For one, they are in labs, and not tests of people in their natural environment. So one does wonder whether what is observed in the lab necessarily carries over in the real world. But two, let's say that violent video games does lead to aggression, but that in the course of a lengthy video game playing episode, the child satisfies that demand for violence by killing more people on screen. This is called the "catharsis" theory, and Anderson, et al. find very little evidence for it in the lab, but negative associations between violent media and violent outcomes have been found. Nevertheless, the sheer amount of scientific evidence for a causal link between media and violence in children is not something one can simply ignore or toss aside with pithy remarks. And so one wonders whether there was something to these earlier periods in American history where regulations were experimented with to limit children exposure to primitive violent media. After all, that is basically what this is about - the comic book is simply a predating of the video game experience, and insofar as there is a causal effect of media violence on child aggression, it's sensible to attempt to regulate it. I would much prefer that than outright prohibition, after all. Still, I wonder just how closely the real-world effects of these regulations have been studied. I'm not 100% convinced by the laboratory tests at this point.