I have just completed a study showing that hardly anyone was motivated to buy a Cadillac during the 2 weeks after they viewed a commercial by the auto maker! Oh, was anyone motivated to buy one during the course of the next year, after watcing these commercials repeatedly? cain’t say. Wasn’t trying to tackle that one.

What I think is essential here is the implicit effort to reframe this debate as one about the “consequences” of viewing violent media rather than about the goodness or badness of violent media (viewing) itself.

The psychological research here appears to me to dovetail well with a generally virtue-oriented approach to media and politics generally. Certainly, the religious figures (and wing of the Republican party) that have most effectively advanced that approach have come under attack from libertarians and others who believe in an absolutist version of “content neutrality.” But a virtue-oriented approach posits that, in the main, consequences are far too hard to determine “objectively” to count for much in the political debate here. The real issue is the quality of the content itself, and the experience of viewing it.

So to the extent the “aggregate empirical data” talks past the important psychological dynamics here, or marginalizes the far richer normative/virtue-oriented discourse, I think it’s as much a distraction as a contribution.

As for the authors of the study being “clueless:” I did not intend that description for them at the outset, only for those who misused their results. But if they really think that a finding of “52000 lives saved a year due to violent movies” is not going to affect the policy debate, maybe its extension would be appropriate.

I’m still not sure who this applies to, other than perhaps some journalists. Not the authors as I read the paper. But you seem to leap from the short-term focus of the study to the argument that these authors reject other forms of knowledge from social science. To me, that’s an odd reaction to a paper that is a complement to existing social science literature, not a substitute.

Are the authors clueless under your definition?

“If the paper really “should not be used to inform policy on the effects of limiting the level of violence allowed in the media,” what’s the point of it?”

The point is learn more about the causal effects of media violence on crime. More is better when it comes to knowledge about this potential causal relationship, no? And perhaps learning about the short-term effects will help us understand better the mechanism through which the long term effects operate.

You have asserted a mechanism that you believe is the most plausible explanation for the long-term relationship and are confident enough in this view that you view efforts to study other channels as “classic errors.” But for those who do not have access to your foresight about what the evidence will show, one generally doesn’t know this until they engage in the research. I would have thought that you would have applauded research efforts to study the detrimental influence of media (even if not on the dimension you think the most important) rather than describe the authors and their study this way.

I have long argued that many commentators are tempted by scientism–a belief that an assertion that is quantifiable is somehow ipso facto more valid than one that is not. Giving this study so much play strikes me as a classic example of that error, given that it has virtually nothing to say about the intuitively most plausible explanation of the bad effect of violent media: namely, a lifelong conditioning toward accepting such acts as normal or normative.

The clueless are those who do not accept the full range of explanatory strategies social science provides. Charles Tilly provides a nice survey of that range:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/10/060410crbo_books

If the paper really “should not be used to inform policy on the effects of limiting the level of violence allowed in the media,” what’s the point of it?

The fact that these authors limit their focus to the short-run effects does not mean that economists aren’t interested in the long-term effects of violent movies (or long term effects generally). The authors note that this is the primary limitation of their research design, describing long term effects as “important,” and noting that this limitation means that the paper “should not be used to inform policy on the effects of limiting the level of violence allowed in the media.”

Of course, data sometimes do not allow us to answer everything at once. Sometimes economists can identify short-term but not long term effects, for examples. But surely you would agree that increasing our empirical knowledge of the short run effects is a contribution with some value, even if marginal (you at least acknolwedge the contribution as “useful”).

But I remain puzzled by the wording of the title of your post. Is “clueless” supposed to describe the authors? It seems to me that you mean the authors (they are, after all, the economists). If so, is it because of they use econometrics? Or is it because they don’t tell us about long term effects and appropriately limit their claims? But I could be wrong. Perhaps it is the readers who misread the scope of the results? Or the journalists who write about them?

Who’s clueless and why?

Crime is not merely delayed until after the credits run, they say. On the Monday and Tuesday after packed weekend showings of violent films, no spike in violent crime emerges to compensate for the peaceful hours at the movies. Even a few weeks later, there is no evidence of a compensating resurgence, they say.

The study also seems to have more in common with your take on violent media than this blog post would let on:

Strikingly, the data shows that crimes also drop, though not by as much, when large audiences see nonviolent films that young men find appealing.In other words, Professor Dahl suggested, Hollywood could help cut crime in more palatable fashion by cutting out the gore while making movies that still attract male teenagers and 20-somethings.