Violence and the Human Heart

I’ve never particularly bought into the notion that violent media images are strongly linked to violent behavior.  A new meta-study suggests I should.

There is now consensus that exposure to media violence is linked to actual violent behavior — a link found by many scholars to be on par with the correlation of exposure to secondhand smoke and the risk of lung cancer. In a meta-analysis of 217 studies published between 1957 and 1990, the psychologists George Comstock and Haejung Paik found that the short-term effect of exposure to media violence on actual physical violence against a person was moderate to large in strength.

NY Times  worth having a look at.

I’d be interested not only in whether such viewing is linked to actual violent behavior but whether the anti-social attitudes of so many screen characters don’t have a bleed-in effect on watchers; not so much that shooting will happen as the general rise of contempt for others, self-centered assurance and the rise of MY opinion over all available facts.