My thoughts -- I think hes making the wrong argument. I took Social Development (PSY 456) this term, and one of the things that I noticed across multiple studies was that kids who are exposed to aggressive behavior on a TV show and repeat it later do so because theyre unable to distinguish the difference between fantasy and reality - they cant contextualize the appropriateness of the aggressive situation. This is why the catharsis hypothesis doesnt work with younger children, why the bobo doll experiment had the same results, and why fairy tales could be poor choices. Imagination is good, and fairy tales may be too, so long as we pick the right ones. Children will consider the story to be real to some degree, or at least the actions of the modeling characters to be appropriate in real life. If we want to pick good stories, we should do so with the ones that speak of common virtues, prosocial behavior, and other community-building influences. Those will make the best positive impact.
Posted on: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 03:54:52 +0000