"... hundreds of studies showing that exposure to media violence ... increases aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, and aggressive behavior ..."

Gun violence in PG-13 films tops level in R-rated movies

Michelle Healy, USA TODAY12:04 a.m. EST November 11, 2013

Young people are exposed to considerable gun presence and violence in PG-13 films, which now exceeds the level of gun violence in R-rated films.

(Photo: AP)

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Violence in films has more than doubled since 1950
• Gun violence in PG-13-rated films has more than tripled since 1985
• Since 2009, PG-13-rated films have contained as much or more violence as R-rated films

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Gun violence in PG-13 movies has more than tripled since 1985, and now exceeds the level found in R-rated movies, a new analysis finds.

With that increase, big-budget Hollywood movies may be adding fuel to aggressive attitudes and behaviors in young moviegoers, says a new study in December's Pediatrics, published online today.

Researchers also found that after 1984, when the PG-13 rating was introduced, gun violence declined in G- or PG-rated films; remaining flat in R-rated films; and increased dramatically in PG-13 films. PG-13 is short for "Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13." R-rated movies are restricted to audiences age 17 and older unless accompanied by a parent or guardian.

Since 2009, the level of gun violence in PG-13 films has been as high as or higher than in R-rated films and has exceeded that level since 2012, the analysis shows.

For parents, these findings are important because PG-13 rated movies are "the ones that target children, and the violence that is shown contains guns," says Brad Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at The Ohio State University and lead author of the study. And these films are more accessible to young people than ever before, on the Internet and cable TV, says Bushman.

There have been "hundreds of studies showing that exposure to media violence ... increases aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, and aggressive behavior," and decreases feelings of empathy and compassion, he says.

Studies also have shown "the near presence of a weapon can make people more aggressive," he adds.

The new study analyzed a database of 945 films sampled from the 30 top-grossing films for each year from 1950 to 2012. Analysts coded each film for the presence of violence and guns during five-minute segments.

The Motion Picture Association of America has "been allowing violence to slowly but surely creep up in PG-13 to be equal to what's in R," says Daniel Romer, director of the Adolescent Communication Institute of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and a study co-author. If more films with gun violence were rated R, it would show that the industry recognizes the potential harm and that parents should have that information, he says.

The Motion Picture Association declined to comment on the study.

Most pediatricians, psychologists and child psychiatrists agree that exposure to depictions of gun violence is unhealthy for children, says pediatrician James Sargent of the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.This research offers "more evidence that the (MPAA) system fails in its mission to warn parents and protect children," he says.

David Horowitz of Media Coalition, Inc., a First Amendment rights group, challenges the study's conclusions about the effects of media violence and its argument that gun violence in films makes young people more violence-prone.

"At the same time that we're seeing more images of violence or images of guns, actual indicators of real world violence have gone down," says Horowitz. "Crime rates have dropped drastically, crime rates for minors and violent crime rates, all of these indicators of what they are suggesting are the implications of the results of this study don't really show in the real world."

Stories - no culture is known to lack them

"The Gift of Adversity" a non-fiction book by Norman E. Rosenthal M.D.

page 231 "Stories are so fundamental to human lives that no culture is know that lacks them. Listening to stories, we hang on every word, riveted, and we care about the characters almost as if they are real. Two famous anecdotes - both favorites of mine - bring this lesson home.

When Charles Dickens "The Curiosity Shop" was first published in the United States, it was a serial. Each week's new chapter arrived by ship - and people knew it. When the angelic heroine, Little Nell, lay at death's door, thousands of New Yorkers met the boat. They simply had to know.  Did Little Nell die?  They called up to the ship's crew. "Is Little Nell Alive?"

Another famous story is told about a powerful version of "King Lear"produced by the Yiddish Theater in New York City in the early twentieth century. The actor playing Lear, the retired King thrown out of his home by his ungrateful granddaughters, so moved a woman in the audience that she stood up in the theater and chastised the daughters right in the middle of the play. "You should be ashamed of yourselves!" she cried out. Then, turning to lear she said, "You can come stay with us if you like.'"

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August 23, 2013

Does Media Violence Lead to the Real Thing?

By VASILIS K. POZIOS, PRAVEEN R. KAMBAM and H. ERIC BENDER

EARLIER this summer the actor Jim Carrey, a star of the new superhero movie “Kick-Ass 2,” tweeted that he was distancing himself from the film because, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, “in all good conscience I cannot support” the movie’s extensive and graphically violent scenes.

Mark Millar, a creator of the “Kick-Ass” comic book series and one of the movie’s executive producers, responded that he has “never quite bought the notion that violence in fiction leads to violence in real life any more than Harry Potter casting a spell creates more boy wizards in real life.”

While Mr. Carrey’s point of view has its adherents, most people reflexively agree with Mr. Millar. After all, the logic goes, millions of Americans see violent imagery in films and on TV every day, but vanishingly few become killers.

But a growing body of research indicates that this reasoning may be off base. Exposure to violent imagery does not preordain violence, but it is a risk factor. We would never say: “I’ve smoked cigarettes for a long time, and I don’t have lung cancer. Therefore there’s no link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer.” So why use such flawed reasoning when it comes to media violence?

There is now consensus that exposure to media violence is linked to actual violent behavior — a link found by many scholars to be on par with the correlation of exposure to secondhand smoke and the risk of lung cancer. In a meta-analysis of 217 studies published between 1957 and 1990, the psychologists George Comstock and Haejung Paik found that the short-term effect of exposure to media violence on actual physical violence against a person was moderate to large in strength.

Mr. Comstock and Ms. Paik also conducted a meta-analysis of studies that looked at the correlation between habitual viewing of violent media and aggressive behavior at a point in time. They found 200 studies showing a moderate, positive relationship between watching television violence and physical aggression against another person.

Other studies have followed consumption of violent media and its behavioral effects throughout a person’s lifetime. In a meta-analysis of 42 studies involving nearly 5,000 participants, the psychologists Craig A. Anderson and Brad J. Bushman found a statistically significant small-to-moderate-strength relationship between watching violent media and acts of aggression or violence later in life.

In a study published in the journal Pediatrics this year, the researchers Lindsay A. Robertson, Helena M. McAnally and Robert J. Hancox showed that watching excessive amounts of TV as a child or adolescent — in which most of the content contains violence — was causally associated with antisocial behavior in early adulthood. (An excessive amount here means more than two hours per weekday.)

The question of causation, however, remains contested. What’s missing are studies on whether watching violent media directly leads to committing extreme violence. Because of the relative rarity of acts like school shootings and because of the ethical prohibitions on developing studies that definitively prove causation of such events, this is no surprise.

Of course, the absence of evidence of a causative link is not evidence of its absence. Indeed, in 2005, The Lancet published a comprehensive review of the literature on media violence to date. The bottom line: The weight of the studies supports the position that exposure to media violence leads to aggression, desensitization toward violence and lack of sympathy for victims of violence, particularly in children.

In fact the surgeon general, the National Institute of Mental Health and multiple professional organizations — including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association — all consider media violence exposure a risk factor for actual violence.

To be fair, some question whether the correlations are significant enough to justify considering media violence a substantial public health issue. And violent behavior is a complex issue with a host of other risk factors.

But although exposure to violent media isn’t the only or even the strongest risk factor for violence, it’s more easily modified than other risk factors (like being male or having a low socioeconomic status or low I.Q.).

Certainly, many questions remain and more research needs to be done to determine what specific factors drive a person to commit acts of violence and what role media violence might play.

But first we have to consider how best to address those questions. To prevent and treat public health issues like AIDS, cancer and heart disease, we focus on modifying factors correlated with an increased risk of a bad outcome. Similarly, we should strive to identify risk factors for violence and determine how they interact, who may be particularly affected by such factors and what can be done to reduce modifiable risk factors.

Naturally, debate over media violence stirs up strong emotions because it raises concerns about the balance between public safety and freedom of speech.

Even if violent media are conclusively found to cause real-life violence, we as a society may still decide that we are not willing to regulate violent content. That’s our right. But before we make that decision, we should rely on evidence, not instinct.

Vasilis K. Pozios, Praveen R. Kambam and H. Eric Bender are forensic psychiatrists and the founders of the consulting group Broadcast Thought.

Games - power to do good or evil

SATURDAY, AUG 17, 2013 07:30 PM EDT

For video games, a moral reckoning is coming

As games get closer to complete realism, developers have to decide whether to use that power for good or evil

BY KEVIN WONG

 
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TOPICS: VIDEO GAMES, REALISM, VIOLENCE, FROM THE WIRES, EDITOR'S PICKS, TECHNOLOGY NEWS,ENTERTAINMENT NEWS

Max Payne 3 (Credit: AP/Rockstar Games)

She was created with a computer program, but she looked real. The proportions were correct, the hair looked lifelike – the skin even had pockmarks and imperfections. For some reason, however, it felt a bit off. Maybe it was the eyes, maybe it was the way she moved, but the overall effect was, in a word, creepy.  This phenomenon is called the “uncanny valley,” and for some game developers, it’s the final barrier between fantasy and reality.

The “uncanny valley” refers to one’s psychological response to a visual representation – say, for example, a character in a video game. As the visual representation becomes more realistic and complex, a player’s psychological response becomes more positive – he or she begins to identify with the character’s human qualities. At a certain point, however, the dynamic shifts – the more lifelike the character is, the more unsettling that character becomes – and the player will feel disgust. Unless the character is a completely flawless rendition; then it’s outside the valley and everything’s fine.

The human eye is very good at detecting fakeness, and for a long time developers confronted this dilemma; they were able to create characters that were lifelike, but not perfectly lifelike. Technology, however, is moving at an exponential rate, and developers may soon escape the uncanny valley, creating something virtual that looks like flesh and blood.

What issues does this raise, at the point where artificial and real become muddled? And what responsibilities do developers have towards players if they decide to simultaneously push the boundaries of technology and gratuitousness?

***

Violence in video games has always been a given – in Contra, released on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987, a player killed hundreds of virtual people with a variety of machine guns. In early games, however, the violence, no matter how ubiquitous, was strangely quaint. It was difficult to be viscerally affected by such rudimentary graphics: a bunch of pixels shooting a pixel at another bunch of pixels.

Only five years later, Mortal Kombat was released in arcades. It was bloody, with dramatic ways of killing your opponent, but what set Mortal Kombat apart from other games was its photo-realism – real actors’ heads and bodies represented playable characters. Digitized voices screamed out when characters got hurt or killed. This wasn’t a matter of square pixels – blood was beginning to look like blood.

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Fast-forward to the present day, and there’s no question that violence in gaming can be painful and tasteless. Take 2007’s Manhunt 2, where a main objective is to execute one’s enemies with a variety of instruments – a pair of scissors, a bat, a scythe and a hacksaw, to name just a few. Or, take 2012’s Max Payne 3; sure, the player is shooting bad guys the entire time, but the game lingers on its violence in near-pornographic fashion. There are zoom-in shots, freeze frames, slow-mo splatters and low-shot angles of every major kill. Realism is one thing, but context also matters; no one would argue that this romanticizing of violence is necessary to creating a believable experience.

And then there are sandbox games, which give players the free will to do wrong. In 2010’s Red Dead Redemption, the player ties a prostitute to the railroad tracks. When she’s ground up by the oncoming train, the player earns a trophy for this specific “achievement.”

No, a player doesn’t have to do this in order to win the game. But that doesn’t really matter. The act of putting it in the game to begin with is where the moral justification fails. It’s not a space marine killing aliens, or a plumber stomping on cartoonish turtles – it’s a person killing people, and it’s supposed to look real.

***

Studies on violent video games have not supported the notion of psychological damage. Human empathy develops during the first years of life, way before the person can even pick up a controller. It continues to develop during childhood and adolescence as a result of many factors, such as parental relationships, environmental variables and an assortment of life experiences. To target video games as the main culprit of violent behavior seems simplistic at best.

“On one hand, it seems common sense to think that exposure to violence can desensitize the observer,” says Dr. Jean Decety, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Chicago. “On the other hand, humans are very resilient and adapt quickly to different social contexts. Most of the soldiers torturing detainees in Iraq were probably caring people when they interacted with their loved ones. Probably a minority of them were psychopaths and enjoyed doing so, but this is a minority. I think that most healthy individuals do not confuse games and simulations with reality.”

“There is no solid evidence from brain research that video games lead to antisocial behavior,” Decety continued. “It is one thing to say that video games impact brain circuits – they do – but such a response is transient.”

“I am not sure that [realism in games] will lead to any sort of long-term damage of any sort, once we control for individual differences and potential vulnerability,” Decety says. “Individual differences in empathy will likely outweigh any type of effect from a particular video game.”

So, we’re left with the ethical principle of the issue, something that critics of video games rarely talk about. Realistic depictions of violence, without moral justification, are distasteful – although video games may not directly create violence, they can contribute to a culture of violence, where depictions of pain and suffering become commonplace and acceptable. And furthermore, why not aspire to something higher than a visceral thrill? Game developers should use violence, if they use it at all, to serve an ethical narrative, rather than making it an end in itself.

***

For David Cage, the founder and creative mind behind game development company Quantic Dream, narrative has always been the top priority. Cage’s last game, 2007’s Heavy Rain, was visually groundbreaking for its time, earning critical praise for its expressive characters. But more importantly to Cage, it meditated upon complex themes more often seen in film: the love between a father and son, moral quandaries about the worth of a single life, and the emotional cost of trusting others.

“[Early] films started with violent scenes, because the technology didn’t allow for anything subtle,” Cage says. “This is exactly where video games are today. We have not yet fully understood that technology is ready for more meaningful experiences. We need to have talent and something to say, which is unfortunately rarely the case.”

Cage was the buzz at this June’s Electronic Entertainment Expo when he presented a new tech demo for the Playstation 4. Tech demos show off a game developer’s graphics capability; last year, Cage’s award-winning demo was Kara, an emotional meta-commentary on a robot that gains the ability to feel. This year’s demo was The Dark Sorcerer, starring a computer -generated sorcerer and his goblin apprentice and playing out in real time. A hackneyed fantasy narrative eventually reveals itself to be a film set: the CGI characters are revealed to be actors, portraying the roles of a sorcerer and a goblin. It was weird and creative, but most importantly, it was funny, and the humor came not only from the words the characters were reciting, but also from the gestures and facial expressions – the actions and reactions that sprang from the back-and-forth rhythm of a conversation. Non-verbal communication – this was new for a medium that has relied on the most blunt of narratives – fists to faces, bullets to bodies – to tell the majority of its tales.

Cage’s upcoming game, Beyond: Two Souls, portrays 15 years in the life of its female protagonist, tracing her struggles from childhood to young adulthood. The game places emphasis upon choice and emotional conflict, and its realism gives texture and subtlety to these concepts. Realism, when applied judiciously, can affirm morality, and the modern game developer has the ethical choice of whether or not to elevate the discourse. For Cage, the decision has always been clear.

“Sometimes I am surprised at the little sense of responsibility that can be seen in some games,” Cage states. “Some of them give the feeling that they were made by a bunch of teenagers laughing out loud as they were making it. I am dreaming of a day when video games won’t need violence anymore to create interesting experiences. We will then have some credibility beyond our little world and be respected as adults in an interesting, creative medium.”

“Games have no choice if they want to continue to exist in the coming years,” he adds. “They will have to grow up.”

MORE KEVIN WONG.

Steve Jobs and Storytelling and 1994 and Pixar and "toy story"

Book - "The Power of Story" by Jim Loehr

page 69
"Because of our unique capacity for language, however, human beings needn't experience something directly to understand it, partially or sometimes even fully. Unlike other living creatures, which learn solely from their own experiences, man learns both from his own experience as well as-through storytelling- the experiences of others. Someone tells us a story and we are touched, we sympathize, we empathize, we are outraged, we understand. We come to conclusions."

"Influence" by Robert B. Cialdini

"The Powerful influence of filmed examples in changing the behavior of children can be used as therapy for various other problems. Some striking evidence is available in the research of Psychologist Robert O'Connor (1972) on socially withdrawn preschool children.We have all seen children of this sort; terribly shy, standing alone at the fringes of the games and groupings of their peers. O'Connor was worried that this early behavior was the beginning of what was to become a long-term pattern of isolation, which in turn could create persistent difficulties in social comfort and adjustment through adulthood. In an attempt to reverse the pattern, O'Connor made a film containing 11 different scenes in a nursery-school setting. Each scene began by showing a different solitary child watching some social activity then actively participating, to everyone's enjoyment. O'Connor selected a group of the most severely withdrawn children from four pre-schools and showed them the film. The impact was impressive.After watching the film, the isolates immediately began to interact with their peers at a level equal to the normal children in the schools. Even more astonishing was what O'Connor found when he returned to the schools six weeks later to observe. While the withdrawn children who had not seenO'Connor's film remained as isolated as ever, those who had viewed it were now leading their schools in amount of social activity. It seems that this 23-minute movie, viewed just once, was enough to reverse a potential lifelong pattern of maladaptive behavior. Such is the potency of the prinicple of social proof."    

George Gerbner - Media Violence Researcher

January 3, 2006

George Gerbner, 86, Researcher Who Studied Violence on TV, Is Dead

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PHILADELPHIA, Jan. 2 (AP) - George Gerbner, a researcher who for decades studied violence on television and how it shapes perceptions of society, died on Dec. 24 at his home here. He was 86.

The cause was cancer, his daughter-in-law Kathie McDermott said.

Mr. Gerbner, who was dean emeritus of the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, studied television for more than three decades.

He founded the Cultural Indicators Research Project in 1968 to track changes in television content and how those changes affect viewers' perceptions of the world. Its database has information on more than 3,000 television programs and 35,000 characters.

Mr. Gerbner said people no longer learned their cultural identity from their family, schools, churches and communities but instead from "a handful of conglomerates who have something to sell."

He coined the phrase "mean world syndrome," a phenomenon in which people who watch large amounts of television are more likely to believe that the world is an unforgiving and frightening place.

"Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures," he testified before a Congressional subcommittee on communications in 1981. "They may accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities. That is the deeper problem of violence-laden television."

Born in Budapest in 1919, Mr. Gerbner intended to study folklore at the University of Budapest but was forced to flee fascist Hungary in 1939.

With the help of his brother, the filmmaker Laszlo Benedek, he came to the United States. Mr. Gerbner graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a journalism degree and worked briefly at The San Francisco Chronicle.

He joined the United States Army in 1942 and served in World War II.

Mr. Gerbner worked as a professor and researcher at the Institute for Communications Research at the University of Illinois from 1956 until 1964, when he accepted a position at Penn. After leaving Penn in 1990, he founded the Cultural Environment Movement, an advocacy group working for greater diversity in media.

He taught at Temple University and Villanova University.

Mr. Gerbner is survived by two sons, John and Thomas, and five grandchildren. His wife of 59 years, Ilona, died Dec. 8.

STORIES lead to BELIEFS leads to ACTION

"Our actions are determined by our beliefs. And our beliefs are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves."

Charles Eisenstein

Is Sponge Bob Destroying Kids' Minds - or Accelerating Their Intelligence

By Amara D. Angelica

Young children who watch fast-paced, fantastical television shows may become “handicapped” in their readiness for learning, says a new University of Virginia study.

U.Va. psychologists tested 4-year-old children immediately after they had watched nine minutes of the popular show “SpongeBob SquarePants” and found that their “executive function” — the ability to pay attention, follow rules, remember what they were told, solve problems, and moderate behavior — had been severely compromised.

“At school, they have to behave properly, they need to sit at a table and eat properly, they need to be respectful, and all of that requires executive functions,” said U.Va. psychology professor Angeline Lillard.

“It is possible that the fast pacing, where characters are constantly in motion from one thing to the next, and extreme fantasy, where the characters do things that make no sense in the real world, may disrupt the child’s ability to concentrate immediately afterward. Another possibility is that children identify with unfocused and frenetic characters, and then adopt their characteristics.”

OK, here’s another possibility: schools are just too damn boring and repressive, and it’s unhealthy to keep kids immobilized like prisoners. Can teachers — who were brainwashed as children to sit quietly, follow the rules, take mind-numbing drugs if they move around, and learn to be good little quiet robots — ever keep up with kids whose minds have been sped up way beyond them?

Here’s an idea: what if we replaced schools — modeled on 19th century factories and churches — with fast-paced animated learning environments using AI-enhanced video games, robot cartoon characters, and educational social networks, so kids can grow up with the ability to handle the wildly accelerating computerized world of the future?

TV Reality Show Inspires Tree Planting

Smith: He Saw the Light and Now He's Planting Trees

Indianapolis Star 9-8-2011 Erika D. Smith

By day, he's a certified public accountant with Crowe Horwath LLP.

By early evening and sometimes by early morning, he's a one-man tree-planting machine.

He's Captain Planet!

Just kidding.

He's David Feinberg, an Indianapolis man who was once so annoyed by environmentalists that he would go out of his way not to recycle. I'm talking deliberately bypassing recycling bins for the trash.

Yet for reasons loosely tied to his love of a TV show (OK, not the cheesy 1990s cartoon "Captain Planet and the Planeteers"), he's decided to plant a tree in a different Indianapolis neighborhood every day this month.

It's an odd project, but it proves that anyone with a little time, money and gumption can do something to improve his or her community. For the small things that can make a big impact, there's no need to wait for help.

"I like to refer to myself as a born-again environmentalist," Feinberg said while digging a hole in an Eastside neighborhood Tuesday.

Next to him, a 5-foot-tall American Hornbeam tree, also known as an Ironwood, lay sprawled on the ground. It was tiny compared with the trees around it, but its new home on North DeQuincy Street seemed appropriate.

"This block is missing one," he said.

Feinberg has taken an odd path from green heathen to green glorifier.

It began about five years ago, when a friend who was in the Peace Corps came to stay with him and his wife, Maureen Keller, for a short time.

Feinberg suddenly found himself outnumbered. His wife and his friend were both big defenders of the environment. Before long, he found himself watching former Vice President Al Gore's documentary on climate change, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Feinberg was a changed man.

He planted a garden in his backyard and began composting. But that wasn't enough.

One day, his favorite reality TV show, "30 Days," gave him an idea. In the show, people spend 30 days doing something they've never done before, whether it's working for minimum wage or living as a Muslim.

"I loved that idea," he said, "so I said I'm going to bring all of this together."

Feinberg's first challenge: become a vegetarian for a month.

He figured it was a worthy green goal because it takes more water and other resources to produce meat for consumption than to grow vegetables.

His second challenge: become a locavore -- or localvore -- for a month.

For the uninitiated, that means he used only products made in Indiana for one month. I'm talking everything from locally grown food to locally made deodorant to gas from Greenfield's GasAmerica. The only products he couldn't find were salt and hair gel.

And now Feinberg is on to his third challenge: plant a tree every day for a month.

He made use of his contacts at Keep Indianapolis Beautiful to persuade the nonprofit to supply all 30 trees, most of which are of species native to Indiana.

Keep Indianapolis Beautiful also helped narrow a list of locations for the trees based on various social and economic factors. So if you see a guy with dark hair and glasses planting a tree on the Near Eastside, in Herron-Morton or along Binford Boulevard, that's Feinberg.

"It takes about a half-hour to plant a tree," he said. "I read somewhere that people spend 30 minutes a day on Facebook. Plant a tree instead."

Or, as Captain Planet would say: "The power is yours!"

Plan B 4.0 Mobilizing To Save Civilization by Lester R. Brown - TV and Radio Dramas Change Behavior

"While the attention of researchers has focused on the role of formal education in reducing fertility, soap operas on radio and television can even more quickly change people's attitudes about reproductive health, gender equity, family size, and environmental protection. A well-written soap opera can gave profound near-term effect on population growth. It costs relatively little and can proceed even while formal educational systems are being expanded.

The Power of this approach was pioneered by Miguel Sabido, a vice president of Televis, Mexico's national television network, when he did a series of soap opera segments on illiteracy. The day after one of the characters in his soap opera visited a literacy office wanting to learn how to read and write, a quarter-million people showed up at these offices in Mexico City. Eventually 840,000 Mexicans enrolled in literacy courses after watching the series.

Sabido dealt with contraception in a soap opera entitled Acompaname, which translates as Come With Me. Over the span of a decade this drama series helped reduce Mexico's birth rate by 34%.

Other groups outside Mexico quickly picked up this approach. The U.S.-based Population Media Center (PMC) headed by William Ryerson, has initiated projects in some 15 countries and is planning launches in several others. The PMC's work in Ethiopia over the last several years provides a telling example. Their radio serial dramas broadcast in Amharic and Oromiffa have addressed issues of reproductive health and gender equity, such as HIV/AIDS, family planning, and the education of girls. A survey two years after the broadcasts began in 2002 found that 63% of new clients seeking reproductive health care at Ethiopia's 48 service centers had listened to one of PMC's dramas.

Among married women in the Amhara region of Ethiopia who listened to the dramas, there was a 55-percent increase in those using family planning. Male listeners sought HIV tests at a rate four times that of non-listeners, while female listeners were tested at three times the rate of female non-listeners. The average number of children per woman in the region dropped from 5.4 to 4.3. And demand for Contraceptives increased 157 percent."

Drew Westen - NY Times - Why stories matter

"The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to “expect” stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought. Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans would know how to read and write.

Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values. Today we seek movies, novels and “news stories” that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories; the holy books of the three great monotheistic religions are written in parables; and as research in cognitive science has shown, lawyers whose closing arguments tell a story win jury trials against their legal adversaries who just lay out 'the facts of the case.' "

Storytelling is vital to being a human being

"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."

Reynolds Price

A Palpable God

David Brooks on why humans need stories

November 10, 2009

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Rush to Therapy

By DAVID BROOKS

We’re all born late. We’re born into history that is well under way. We’re born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn’t choose. On top of that, we’re born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can’t control. We’re thrust into social conditions that we detest. Often, we react in ways we regret even while we’re doing them.

But unlike the other animals, people do have a drive to seek coherence and meaning. We have a need to tell ourselves stories that explain it all. We use these stories to supply the metaphysics, without which life seems pointless and empty.

Among all the things we don’t control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to make sense of the world. Individual responsibility is contained in the act of selecting and constantly revising the master narrative we tell about ourselves.

The stories we select help us, in turn, to interpret the world. They guide us to pay attention to certain things and ignore other things. They lead us to see certain things as sacred and other things as disgusting. They are the frameworks that shape our desires and goals. So while story selection may seem vague and intellectual, it’s actually very powerful. The most important power we have is the power to help select the lens through which we see reality.

Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged.