[Buddha-l] [Fwd: [skepnet] narratives and agression

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

-------- Originele bericht --------
Onderwerp: 	[skepnet] bijbellezen bevordert agressie
Datum: 	Fri, 18 May 2007 20:34:08 +0200
Van: 	Jan Willem Nienhuys <jnienhuy at win.tue.nl>
Antwoord-naar: 	skepnet at yahoogroups.com
Aan: 	skepnet at yahoogroups.com



Not only action films and killer computer games can increase 
aggressive behavior. New research proves: literary texts do 
the same, especially those offering divine justification for 
acts of violence. And their influence is not limited to 
religious extremists. Scientists of the reputed Institute for 
Social Research (ISR) at Michigan University (USA) found that 
reading about violence in the name of God provokes aggression 
in average believers and even non-believers. "It's important 
to note that we obtained evidence supporting this hypothesis 
in samples of university students who were, in our estimation,
not typical of the terrorists who blow up civilians," wrote 
Brad Bushman, professor of psychology and communication at ISR. 
"Even among our participants who were not religiously devout, 
exposure to God-sanctioned violence increased subsequent 
aggression. That the effect was found in such a sample may attest 
to the insidious power of exposure to literary scriptural violence."

Prof. Bradman and his colleagues conducted two independent studies 
with students from Brigham Young University (USA) and Vrije 
Universiteit Amsterdam (Netherlands) and published the results 
in the magazine Psycholocal Science (Volume 18, No.3, "When God 
Sanctions Killing. Effects of Scriptural Violence on Aggression"). 
After reporting their religious affiliations and beliefs (USA: 99 
percent of participants believed in God and the Bible; Netherlands: 
50 percent believed in God and 27 percent in the Bible), both groups 
were  given the same text for reading. It was an adaptation of a 
passage from the King James Bible that discribed the brutal rape 
and murder of a woman and her husband´s call for revenge on her 
attackers (Old Testament). 
[JW: dit is is het verhaal dat verteld wordt aan het eind
van Richteren vanaf vers 19:22]

Half of the participants of each group read a version that included 
a sentence in which God commanded his followers to take arms against 
others, half got a version without this sentence. 


Half were told the text came from the Old Testament, half were made 
believe it came from some ancient scroll discovered by archologists. 
After reading the text, the test persons participated in a simple 
reaction test, each of them competing with a partner from outside the 
groups. The winner, they were told, would be able to "blast" the 
losing partner with noise as loud as fire alarm (about 105 decibels) - 
a common experimental measure of aggression. The researchers found 
that both the religious and non-religious students blasted their 
partners with louder noise, when told that the text they read came from
the Bible. Aggressive responses also increased with participants who 
had read the text including the direct reference to God calling for 
violence. However, the increased level of aggression was always 
greater among believers than among non-believers. "Our results further 
confirm previous research showing that exposure to violent media 
causes people to behave more aggressively if they identify with the 
violent characters than if they do not," Prof. Bushman said.

Established in 1948, the ISR is one of the world´s leading institutes 
for development and application of social science methodology and 
collaborates with social scientists in more than 60 nations.




-- 
dr. J.W. Nienhuys
Dommelseweg 1A
5581 VA Waalre


 


Erik


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