David Phillips Prize Fight Experiment

The amount of homicides and violence is steadily increasing. The media plays a large role in what information is shared with us and how information is shared with us. Without the media, we probably would not know half the things going on in the world. The media is the main means of mass communication. The media can have both positive and negative influences on people. This paper will discuss examples of what can happen when media broadcasts violence. This paper will compare and contrast David Phillips Prize fight experiment as well as Todd Millers reanalysis of Phillips experiment. Also, being compared is Martins experiment on aggression in classrooms and Elson’s review on experiments researching media and violence.
Phillips experiment examines
The total increase was 11.62.6. Phillips also tested four possible explanations to determine the best explanation for the increase in aggression following a nationally televised prize fight. The hypothesis is the personal experience hypothesis, modeling hypothesis, precipitation hypothesis and gambling hypothesis.
The personal experience hypothesis tested whether the prize fight affects only those actually attending the fight, not those experiencing it through the mass media. Phillips noted that “If this is so, one cannot claim that mass media violence is triggering a rise in homicides.” Phillips also said that if a person personally experienced the prize fight then prize fights occurring outside the United States should trigger few if any U.S. homicides. This also means that the prize fights within the U.S should show a much larger increase in homicides. The evidence showed that following the average foreign fight homicides rose by 12 and 2.862 after the average U.S. fight. Phillips concluded that the personal experience hypothesis was not plausible. The next hypothesis is the modeling hypothesis. The modeling hypothesis came in two parts. The first part This included two tests. The first suggests that a