Quote:
Originally Posted by dogsbody70
The test was to see how those children would react in certain situations.
Simply, when the individual child was interviewed, the "teacher" accidentally on purpose would allow a book to slip to the floor. would the child pick up the book and return it to the teacher?
THe general outcome was that the child who had watched a non violent film or played non violent games-- would bend down to return the book, but most of the others ignored the book and carried on. In other words-- they did not care about the fallen book or think they should have picked it up.
I believe in certain circusmstance we do become isolated and removed and too easily lose our sense of what is right or what is wrong and the feeling of helpfulness disregarded.
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While I agree with the premise, I am not entirely in agreement with the assessment of this experiment's results. There are those who become desensitized and would ignore something such as the fallen book, but there is another cause and effect to consider. Those who have been besieged with violence (media or otherwise) can also develop the opposite response - one of heightened sensitivity which could make a student overly cautious of others. In such case the child may have been wary of doing anything other than the response they saw from the authority figure - the teacher. The teacher ignored it, so outwardly they did the same rather than risk disapproval.
Neither of those causes, when taken to an extreme is a desired human response.