Is Violence Entertaining? Really?

Many years ago, I worked as a science consultant for an independent production company that made wildlife films. They produced these films at their own expense and then sold them to specialist wildlife channels. What struck me when writing scripts for these wildlife films was the need for drama. There must (I was told) be a moment of life or death when an animal is in jeopardy. These moments had to be sought out by careful editing and amplified with dramatic music.

Because channels make money from advertising, they only buy productions that catch and hold the attention of viewers. The more viewers they have, the more they can charge advertisers. Producers compete with other productions to be aired, which means catching our attention is paramount. Attention is complex with many levels, but our most primal attention is caught by sex and threat, procreation and survival.

Survival Instincts

Natural selection has honed an immediate unconscious shift of focus toward potential sex and/or the threat of violence. This alarm system is so hardwired that our senses shift before we have even noticed anything. If sex and violence are presented together, viewers are almost unable to not pay attention. These survival instincts are not easily overridden.

Because even news programmes must compete with other news providers for viewing numbers, the "news" is not merely about informing us but about grabbing our attention. Producers will therefore find a way to make "sex" newsworthy (scandals are great for this) but they can always fall back on violent traumatic events near or far. Even weather predictions need to compete for your attention and so must present the weather as a scary potentially dangerous event. Natural selection in the attention-advertising market inevitably means that everything is dramatic!

This has a terrible impact on our well-being.

Although those profiting from violent entertainment claim there is no link between violence as entertainment and violent behaviour in the real world, research shows that immersing yourself in violence does make you more aggressive. Just as unscrupulous guerrilla armies turn "normal" boys into violent soldiers by exposing them to a constant stream of violent videos, a long-term study of more than 3,000 video gamers playing violent games found them to be significantly more angry, anxious, and aggressive.

More alarming still is the suggestion that those with undiagnosed heart problems can even die while playing violent video games. A recent investigation of reported cases of children blacking out while playing war games led to the shocking discovery that children with undiagnosed heart problems can die from heart attacks while playing particularly emotional moments such as winning or losing in multiplayer war games. Jonathan Skinner, MBChB, MD, from Sydney, warns, "Having looked after children with heart rhythm problems for more than 25 years, I was staggered to see how widespread this emerging presentation is, and to find that a number of children had even died from it. All of the collaborators are keen to publicize this phenomenon so our colleagues across the globe can recognize it and protect these children and their families.”

How Perception Is Embodied

How violent entertainment harms us comes down to the way perception is embodied. Recent research has established that our nervous system responds to whatever we hear, read, or see by simulating the experience in our body. This is why we feel scared when something scary happens to someone else, why we feel a twinge when someone else is hurt on the screen, and why we get aroused watching porn. As we perceive information, we embody it, feel it, and share it. This is how we feel others’ pain and catch others’ emotions, and it is why we can suffer from what is known as secondary trauma. Somatic empathy is a natural human experience, but it leaves us vulnerable to harm from overexposure to violent media.

The excess of dramatic entertainment on offer is not necessarily a reflection of what viewers want to watch. Viewing figures are consistently high for gentle, kind films with happy endings. The excessive drama we are exposed to is about triggering our most basic instincts so that we can’t help but watch— in other words, manipulation rather than preference. As Tristan Harris of the Centre for Humane Technology and the documentary The Social Dilemma says, the attention economy has us “in a race to the bottom of the brain stem,” meaning it is leading us progressively further back to our most primitive brain functions.

Violent entertainment is not harmless. It is arousing; it readies us for more violence, which is not good for individuals or society. If we are mindful, we can avoid giving our attention to violent entertainment and so protect our own well-being.