The Appeal of Media Violence in a Full‐length Motion Picture: An Experimental Investigation

This paper reports the results of an experiment that examined the appeal of violence in a full‐length motion picture. College students (N = 134) were randomly assigned to view one of two different versions of The Fugitive. One version was the original theatrical release and the other version was identical except for the fact that nearly all of the scenes of violence were deleted. Deleting the violence did not affect enjoyment or perceptions of the quality of the movie. The popular assumption that violence is an enjoyable film commodity is suspect based on these results.

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