Beware of holy scriptures! Reading of God-sanctioned violence makes aggressive, prove researchers Not only action films and killer computer games can increase aggressive behavior. New research proves: literary texts do the same, especially those offering divine justification for acts of violence. And their influence is not limited to religious extremists. Scientists of the reputed Institute for Social Research (ISR) at Michigan University (USA) found that reading about violence in the name of God provokes aggression in average believers and even non-believers. “It's important to note that we obtained evidence supporting this hypothesis in samples of university students who were, in our estimation, not typical of the terrorists who blow up civilians," wrote Brad Bushman, professor of psychology and communication at ISR. "Even among our participants who were not religiously devout, exposure to God-sanctioned violence increased subsequent aggression. That the effect was found in such a sample may attest to the insidious power of exposure to literary scriptural violence." Prof. Bradman and his colleagues conducted two independent studies with students from Brigham Young University (USA) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Netherlands) and published the results in the magazine Psycholocal Science (Volume 18, No.3, "When God Sanctions Killing. Effects of Scriptural Violence on Aggression"). After reporting their religious affiliations and beliefs (USA: 99 percent of participants believed in God and the Bible; Netherlands: 50 percent believed in God and 27 percent in the Bible), both groups were given the same text for reading. It was an adaptation of a passage from the King James Bible that discribed the brutal rape and murder of a woman and her husband´s call for revenge on her attackers (Old Testament). Half of the participants of each group read a version that included a sentence in which God commanded his followers to take arms against others, half got a version without this sentence. Half were told the text came from the Old Testament, half were made believe it came from some ancient scroll discovered by archologists. After reading the text, the test persons participated in a simple reaction test, each of them competing with a partner from outside the groups. The winner, they were told, would be able to "blast" the losing partner with noise as loud as fire alarm (about 105 decibels) - a common experimental measure of aggression. The researchers found that both the religious and non-religious students blasted their partners with louder noise, when told that the text they read came from the Bible. Aggressive responses also increased with participants who had read the text including the direct reference to God calling for violence. However, the increased level of aggression was always greater among believers than among non-believers. "Our results further confirm previous research showing that exposure to violent media causes people to behave more aggressively if they identify with the violent characters than if they do not," Prof. Bushman said. Established in 1948, the ISR is one of the world´s leading institutes for development and application of social science methodology and collaborates with social scientists in more than 60 nations. |