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Educated Guess

Turns Out Kids Aren’t Actually Fans of Violence in Television

by Susana Polo | 4:24 pm, May 24th

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An assistant professor has published a study on what appeals to kids in television with some interesting results, mostly due to an interesting distinction that he explored: the difference between violence in a cartoon and action.

Specifically, he found that children identified more with characters and enjoyed a show more if the show wasn’t violent.

Research assistants showed each child one of four versions of a five-minute animated short created for the study and then led them through a questionnaire. The short was designed to resemble familiar slapstick cartoons. Four different versions of the cartoon were used. Six violent scenes were added to one version, which was carried out by both characters and in response to earlier aggression. Nine action scenes were added to another version. Two other versions had lower amounts of action or violence.

Andrew J. Weaver and co-authors Jakob Jensen, Nicole Martins, Ryan Hurley, and Barbara Wilson found that, contrary to our cultural assumption that boys are more agressive, young boys found it easier to identify with characters who weren’t violent. When the kids identified with the characters, they liked them more, and enjoyed the show more.

Oddly enough, girls did not have a similar reaction, researchers say because most of them perceived the characters to be male, and so did not identify with them as strongly as the boys, whether or not the characters were violent. The study’s authors seemed puzzled that the kids would assume purposefully their un-gendered characters were male, but it makes perfect sense to us.

The cartoon the researchers used, “Picture Perfect Thief,” featured a villain called Eggle, who attempted to steal a painting created by a hero called Orangehead. Eggle ultimately fails and the hero’s painting wins first place in an art show. It was created by a friend using Macromedia Flash.

I can only assume that the characters themselves were cartoony and somewhat abstract, and we all know that the way you make a girl cartoon is to put a pink bow on her. No really, TVTropes calls it Tertiary Sexual Characteristics:

When they must assign gender to animals, inanimate objects, or even abstract concepts, writers and artists have hit upon an ingenious solution: Put A Bow On Her Head! Because Every Girl Is Cuter With Hair Decs!

Writers tend to assume that for some reason most viewers will assume that the protagonist is a guy by default. So to make absolutely sure there’s no Viewer Gender Confusion, developers will assign Tertiary Sexual Characteristics to the females. Occasionally, males will have some as well, but they tend to be much less obvious.

(We’ve left all the original links in to preserve TVTropes’ particular kind of coherence.)

Weaver says he would like to reapply his research on girls using an action show with clear female main characters, like The Powerpuff Girls. In the meantime, writers have some evidence to show producers that they can use action to draw in child viewers, not just violence.

(Eureka Alert via Jezebel.)

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  • http://twitter.com/benthebook Ben Riley

    Having watched the cartoon in question, I can strongly suggest that the results of the study are somewhat skewed by the terrible quality of the animation and the out of context violence.  It wasn’t a Tom and Jerry like cartoon which has slapstick violence or an Avatar:TLA story in which fighting occurs because the necessity of the storyline.  A dude with an egg for a head, sneaks into this guys house then for no reasons hits him with a completely straight arm and then folds himself into a paint bucket, it was utterly ridiculous. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Rocio-Elam/100001980711491 Rocio Elam

    I have to agree with Ben here even though I have not seen the cartoon or read the entirety of the study. Having read a few studies (currently in the process of writing a literature review myself) the first thing I asked was, what context was the violence in? Seeing the videos in question were created by an outsider and not manipulated videos of actual cartoons, it was easy to imagine that the violence would be overly dramatic, too cartoony, out of context, or simply added in with no context. Now, had tehy compared different cartoons or the same cartoon with violent vs nonviolent content, I would be more inclined to consider these results as valid. However, given the circumstances, all I can say is that I look forward to the female-centered study’s results should the research team use actual Powerpuff Girls cartoons or something similar to recreate (or disprove) the findings of the previous study with females.

  • Taste_is_Sweet

    The reason that–at least in North America–everyone assumes that a character with no gender specification is male isn’t vague. The prevalence of male characters in pretty much everything mainstream; the fact that it’s still far more common to refer to a generic person or animal as ‘he’ rather than ‘she’; the fact that ‘Mankind’ is still used to reference all of humanity; all these are reasons why the girls in the study assumed that the characters in the cartoons were male. There is no such thing as gender neutrality in this world. After all, even God is a man.

  • http://profiles.google.com/hzg.lauren Hillary Lauren

    Agreed–In Western culture, women really are “the second sex.”

    I’m also irked that the TVtrope people thnk that it’s always the writer’s fault to “assume” the default sex is male. As an illustrator, I’ve found over and over that *everyone* will assume default sex of male if the character is not doing or portraying a gender stereotype. So, I usually just represent and throw in some subtle eyelashes.

    Now, I agree that female characters are horribly too few… the ‘default sex’ issue is just ingrained into our culture today, even if writers/illustrators try to challenge it.