By attending the workshop ” How the media influence our behaviour” Savremena’s students learnt about the effects of the media and expressed their views on this topic. Together with the school psychologist they analysed what drew their attention on television, what they searched on the Internet, whether they edited their profiles on social networks or played video games.

The students pointed out that they were reluctant to watch reality shows, but they could not avoid them on television. They didn’t buy newspapers, but read them online, most often listened to music through YouTube and had profiles on all the popular social networks.

What Facebook profiles tell about their owners

Taking the examples of several Facebook profiles, the students were debating about what could be concluded only on the basis of the content. They learnt why it was important to limit access to the users they don’t know.

They also discussed how future employers may exclude a person from selection for the job, if they saw something inappropriate on their Facebook page. With the permission of some students, their Facebook profiles were commented as well.

Tolerance at its finest

A part of the work which was particularly intriguing was about the social-psychological experiment in connection with the site for meeting and behavior of girls and boys in the meetings. Students were reminded of the importance of tolerance, in this case, according to obese people. We observed the differences in the reactions in relation to whether the person in question was a boy or a girl. In fact, they noticed that only one of the five young men remained at a meeting with the girl who is overweight, while only one in five girls left the meeting with obese guys.

Students also had the opportunity to test their tolerance. They imagined how would they react in this situation and decided that they would stay until the end of a date afterall. They would do this simply out of courtesy but would at the same time blame the insincerity of those who photoshopped their own photos in order to look thinner. In conclusion, the students expressed the view that the internal quality is more important than external appearance.

Can the media encourage aggression?

The psychologist explained to the students three social-psychological theories about the connection between media and aggression, and they voted for the theory they most agreed with. Subsequently, based on these theories, students have predicted the outcome of the conducted psychological research. Thus, for example, they guessed whether the rise in popularity of the video games was followed by a decrease or increase of the crimes committed, and determined the percentage of boys and girls who played aggressive games or had a fight in the past year compared to those who did not play.

Students cited numerous examples of the connection between media and violence, as for example the film “We need to talk about Kevin” which has been linked to terrorist attacks (recently in Paris, over the tower-twins and in high school in Colorado in the US).

At the end of the workshop, together they came to the conclusion that violent content and events can encourage mentally unstable people to aggression.