This week in class, we went over media ethics and how they have played a role in what we see in the media every day. The motion picture companies had little regulation, and none outside of self-regulation, to what they were able to put in their films. In the late 1920’s, there was a large group of researchers who wanted to prove that films were “poisoning” the minds of the youth. This was known as the Payne Fund Study. This study went on to bring in the Production Code for the motion picture industry. The Production Code was put into place to regulate the motion picture industry.

Another thing that we went over in class this week was Cultivation Theory. Cultivation Theory was a theory thought up by researcher George Gerbner that predicted that people who were heavy users of television and film were more likely to see the world as “dangerous, mean and violent” than those who were light users of those mediums. This was also known as “Mean World Syndrome”.

We also watched a short film called the “Human Behavior Experiment”. This film went over different ways that humans will react to situations while alone and also while with others. There were many different examples of this in the film, such as Stanley Milgrim’s experiment with fake electrical shocks to people by subjects who had no idea that it was an experiment. These people would give “shocks” to people in the other room until they would deny to give anymore “shocks” to the person in the other room. There was also the example of the Genovese Murder, when people heard the screams of a woman getting murdered, and did not call the police when they heard it. There was an experiment to see if people would react different to emergencies when they were alone versus when there were others around them. This experiment found that people would help when they believed it was only them that heard, but if there were others they were less likely to help.

We also saw what happened during the Stanford Prison Experiment. This was an experiment to see how people would act while in a prison like situation. It involved two dozen male students that volunteered to be in an experiment that they had no idea what would happen. The people who would be the “guards” were given an officer like outfit, and the “prisoners” were given a long smock with only a number that they would be referred to for the duration of the experiment. After only six days, a “prisoner” had a mental breakdown, and everyday after that another one would ask to be removed. The experiment only lasted for about half of the original two weeks that it was scheduled to last.