Leonard Eron, 87; psychologist saw link between TV violence, aggression
Leonard Eron, the psychologist whose landmark research demonstrated a link between violent television images and aggression in children, then helped fuel a national debate on the issue, died May 3 of congestive heart failure at his home in Lindenhurst, Ill. He was 87.
The message of Eron’s research was clear: The more violence children watched on television, the more aggressive they were in school. Over the years, those findings drew loud objections from television executives, but Eron argued that the correlation was undeniable.
“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 during a 1993 appearance on the “MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour.” “And it’s the same thing with television violence viewing and subsequent behavior, especially in young children.”
Eron’s research “really started a trend that has led to a substantial influence on what I’d call public interest policy, if not government policy,” said Rowell Huesmann, a friend and professor of psychology and communication studies at the University of Michigan. “Just about every major public policy organization interested in children’s health has come out opposed to exposing children to media violence.”
The study began in 1960 with 875 third-graders all living in Columbia County, a semirural community in New York. Proving a link between violence and television was not the aim of the research; Eron suspected a link between child-rearing practices and aggression in children, he told Knight-Ridder in a 1993 article.
During those years the field of mental health was little understood and parents were apprehensive about participating in the study. Some in the local media spoke strongly against participating in the study, characterizing it as a communist conspiracy aimed at mind control, said Eron’s son, Don Eron of Boulder, Colo.
So Eron and the other researchers, including Leopold O. Walder and Monroe M. Lefkowitz, included what Eron called “Ladies Home Journal” questions. These were harmless questions about television-viewing habits designed to help relax parents during the interview. But when the data were analyzed, including the television-viewing questions, the violence link “just hit us in the face,” Eron said.
In 1969, as concern about television violence grew, the U.S. surgeon general commissioned a study. Eron returned to interview the youth of Columbia County, who were then 19 years old. In the second round of interviews, the study found that boys who watched violent television had been involved in more fights. Children who were not described as aggressive when they were in third grade, but who watched television with violent content, were more likely to be aggressive when they were 19.
“There were hearings before Congress and the surgeon general said, ‘There comes a time when the data are sufficient to justify action. That time has come,’ ” recalled Huesmann, who worked with Eron on the study and testified before the congressional committee. “That was really the start of the real long-lasting debate.”
For most of his professional life, Eron was part of that debate.
Born April 22, 1920, in Newark, N.J., Eron grew up in Passaic, the son of Lithuanian immigrants. Aiming for a career as an actor, he won a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. When his father died, 19-year-old Eron “thought he should do something more responsible,” said his son Don.
In 1941, Eron earned a bachelor’s degree from City College of New York, having worked his way through school as an usher at movie houses. He was drafted into the Army, where he spent four years stationed in North Africa and Europe.
“The experience of fighting and living through the Second World War ... was formative in his interest in aggression and violence,” Huesmann said. After leaving the Army, he resumed his studies, earning a master’s in 1946 at Columbia University, where he met Madeline Marcus. The couple later married and had three children. In addition to his son Don, Eron is survived by his wife and a daughter, Barbara Eron of Lindenhurst, Ill. Another daughter, Joan, died of cancer in 1990.
In 1949, Eron earned a doctorate in psychology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and in 1955 he worked at Yale University. For 20 years beginning in 1969 he taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was professor emeritus. He was also on the faculty of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor from 1992 to 2003.
The children of Columbia County remained a part of his research. When the subjects were 30 years old, researchers found that those who had been aggressive children now had police records for felony assaults, drunk driving and speeding. Aggressive children were also more likely to have grown up to work blue-collar jobs, be unemployed or spend time in jail -- a finding that contradicted the view that aggressive children grew up to be successful go-getters.
In his later years, Eron and Huesmann sought ways to intervene to prevent aggressive children from becoming aggressive adults.
“Kids learn a certain way of behaving and solving problems,” Eron told the Associated Press in 1985. “It sticks with them.”
