Enhancement of Punitive Behavior by Audio-Visual Displays

Abstract

A group of male hospital attendants watched the knife-fight scene from the motion picture Rebel Without a Cause. A second, control, group watched an innocuous educational film. The group who watched the fight (the motion picture with aggressive content), and who were then required to run a conditioning experiment, punished errors more severely, using a significantly higher level of intensity of the punitive electric shock, than did the control group.