Rowell Huesmann: Straight Shooter

by Susan Rosegrant

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It's an iconic moment in film. Clint Eastwood, in the role of Harry Callahan, or Dirty Harry, has cornered Scorpio, a despicable giggling deviant, at the end of a battered dock. Harry is a renegade San Francisco cop who operates by his own rules—no matter how risky or brutal—to rescue victims and get bad guys: His illegal torture and interrogation of Scorpio earlier in the movie is what put the murderer back on the street. Now Scorpio, already shot once by Harry, reaches tentatively towards the gun he has dropped. Harry talks softly, speculating that the injured man must be wondering whether Harry's .44 Magnum still has one bullet left in its chamber or is empty. "You've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?" Harry says softly. Then his face twists, and he spits out, "Well, do ya, punk?" Thus taunted, Scorpio grabs for his gun and Harry fires the fatal shot, propelling Scorpio's body into the still water below.

An adult watching Dirty Harry might gasp at the bloody parts, register a twisted sense of pleasure at Harry's hard justice, and go on with life. But what happens when kids, say ten years old or even younger, see violent movies or television shows featuring shootouts, stabbings, or chainsaw massacres—especially if they watch them week after week? According to L. Rowell Huesmann, director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD) at the Institute for Social Research (ISR), the question isn't academic. Regular viewing of such violent scenes, he says, predisposes children to be aggressive, not only in the hours or days after exposure, but even decades later.

Huesmann's groundbreaking research has helped shape society's understanding of the psychological foundations of aggression. In the process, Huesmann—a lean 66-year-old with a long tan face and a wide Jiminy Cricket smile—has become one of the go-to people on the impacts of violent media on behavior. "Rowell is like a god of aggression research," says Brad Bushman, an RCGD research professor and professor of psychology and communications studies who works with Huesmann. Huesmann is also a lightning rod in the fierce controversy over the degree to which violent media beget violent behavior and what, if anything, should be done about it.

Huesmann began his research on aggression 40 years ago as a young assistant professor of psychology at Yale. Leonard Eron, a professor and clinical psychologist, needed a collaborator who was a strong statistician and who could do sophisticated data analysis; Huesmann, with Ph.D.s in systems and communications science and psychology from Carnegie-Mellon, fit the bill. Back in 1960, Eron had launched a study of the more than 800 third graders in upstate New York's Columbia County to look at the prevalence of aggressive behavior among Middle American youth. Initially, the influence of media violence was not even on Eron's radar screen, Huesmann says. But a few filler questions meant to put respondents at ease—what Eron referred to as the "Ladies' Home Journal questions"—asked about kids' TV viewing habits. Those questions, Huesmann says, turned out to be a stroke of genius. "When they coded those programs that the children watched for violence," he says, "the watching of more violent programs was correlated with aggressive behavior."

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