I've had many people tell me that they watch television, and that it has no impact at all on their world view or behavior. What we view and what we think about affects our actions. And there is abundant psychological evidence that television viewing affects our world view. George Gerbner and Larry Gross, working at the Annenberg School of Communications in the 1970s, found that heavy television viewers live in a scary world. We have found that people who watch a lot of TV see the real world as more dangerous and frightening than those who watch very little.
Heavy viewers are less trustful of their fellow citizens, and more fearful of the real world.
Approximately one-third of all American adults fit that category. Gerbner and Gross found that violence on prime-time TV exaggerated heavy viewers' fears about the threat of danger in the real world. Heavy viewers, for example, were less likely to trust others than light viewers. Heavy viewers also tended to overestimate their likelihood of being involved in a violent crime. And if this is true of adults, imagine how television violence affects children's perceptions of the world.