Kagan Supports Move To Restrict Violence On Daily Television

Jerome S. Kagan, professor of Developmental Psychology, has joined an attempt to limit the level of violence on television through legal action.

The Foundation to Improve Television-of which Kagan is a director-has filed suit to prevent a Washington television station from broadcasting "The Wild, Wild West" weekday afternoons, charging that the televising of violence before 10 p.m. violates "the constitutional rights of child viewers."

Kagan explained yesterday that the viewing of such violence by young children "might impair the development of their psychological inhibition against aggression."

"There is good reason to believe that watching violence on television makes it easier for children to commit anti-social violent acts in the real world," he said.

"The function of the lawsuit is to get the station and the networks to rethink their policies. We are trying to put pressure on sponsors to cut down the showing of such programs to young children," he added.

"It brings up all the problems of censorship-do we have the right to regulate what people see on television," Kagan said. "We are hoping that they [the station and the program's sponsors] will say, 'the hell with it' and put on another show in its place."

"If the station can make just as much money on 'Sesame Street,' they will put it on. They are not particularly pro-violence," he said.

Kagan disagreed with the foundation's choice of 10 p.m. as the earliest time violent shows should be broadcast. "I'm personally concerned with the child below the age of seven or eight who is usually in bed by 8 p.m."

"There is no open and shut case that violence on television is necessarily harmful to children. It is not easy to prove that what is seen on television is a cause of pathology," Kagan said. "But there is sufficient cause to believe that it is harmful."

As evidence of the potential effect of television on children, Kagan cited an experiment by Stanford professor Albert Bandura in which children with "an authentic phobia of dogs" learned to approach them after seeing incidents so television of people playing with dogs.

"A half hour after "The Wild, Wild West' goes off the air the news reports come on. It might be hard for a child to separate that which is real," Kagan said. "The argument is that this might be deleterious to some young children."