On Sun, 21 Dec 2003, Brendan Nelson wrote: > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Lester Kenyatta Spence [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Sent: 21 December 2003 06:50 > > > > There's been some attempt to actually test this empirically....to see > > whether exposure to rap music (or other "aggressive art forms" like heavy > > metal) has an impact on how people think and behave. there's some > > tentative support for the relationship. people listening to violent hip > > hop are more likely to support violence as a means of conflict resolution > > than people listening to non-violent hiphop. > > The question is, though, does their tendency to support violence as a means > of conflict resolution influence their musical tastes towards violent > hip-hop, or has that tendency only come about as a result of their exposure > to violent hip-hop? It's a bit of a chicken'n'egg question I suppose.
Not in this case....the power of the experiment is that you're able to ferrett out the causal element. This is the way it works. Take a population of subjects and split them in two (or three, four, etc.) such that if you compare the resulting groups to each other, there is no substantive difference. There aren't more women than men, there aren't significant income differences, etc. Then you expose one group to one set of stimuli, and expose the other group to some sort of placebo. The difference in the response to the dependent variable HAS to come from exposure to the stimuli. So if the groups are the same in the hiphop experiment I note above, then the only reason the one group prefers violent conflict resolution is because there is something about what they were exposed to that CAUSES them to. peace lks
