Leonard D. Eron, a psychologist whose 50 years of research led him to warn society that children who watched violent television shows tend to show aggressive and destructive behavior later in life, died May 3 of congestive heart failure at his home in Lindenhurst, Ill. He was 87.
Aggression is a learned behavior, Eron determined, and watching violent TV shows, including cartoons, makes violence seem normal to children.
These conclusions, not without controversy in the television industry, grew out of a long-term study of 800 people from upstate New York who were third-graders in 1960. He followed up with them 10 years later, 20 years later and 40 years later, in 2000. The study is ongoing.
“We found that youngsters at age 8 who were not aggressive at school but were watching violent TV at home were by age 18 significantly more aggressive than youngsters who at age 8 were aggressive at school but not watching violent TV at home,” Eron told The Washington Post in 1995. “The kids who watched violent TV at age 8 are significantly more aggressive by the time they reach age 30 – more criminal convictions, more abuse of spouses, more drunk-driving convictions.” He also found that as the aggressive subjects grew up and had children of their own, those children were more aggressive than their peers. He ran similar long-range studies of children in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park and of children in Finland, Australia, Israel and Poland, with similar results.
His findings have been widely cited and duplicated over the years, and he testified multiple times before Congress. He published seven books and more than 100 professional articles and was chairman of the American Psychological Association’s Commission on Violence and Youth.
“There is no rational person outside the tobacco industry who would deny that there is a causative link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer,” Eron said in 1993. “And it’s the same thing with television violence viewing and subsequent behavior, especially in young children.” Born in Newark, he grew up in Passaic, N.J., and graduated from the City College of New York. After one year at Columbia University, he was drafted into the Army and served during World War II in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. After the war, he returned to Columbia and received a master’s degree in psychology in 1946. He received a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Wisconsin in 1948.
He taught at Yale University until 1955, spent the following seven years at the Rip Van Winkle Clinic in New York, then taught at the University of Iowa during the 1960s.
He taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1969 to 1990 and at the University of Michigan until 2003, when he retired at age 83.
A daughter, Joni Eron Hobson, died in 1990.
Survivors include his wife of 56 years, Madeline Marcus of Lindenhurst, Ill.; two children, Don Eron of Boulder, and Barbara Eron of Lindenhurst; and two grandchildren.
Eron was not looking for the effect of television on children’s behavior when he found it. He was looking for the impact of child-rearing practices on kids, and as a way of relaxing his subjects, asked a number of simple questions about television viewing habits.
But the results “hit us in the face,” Eron said.
