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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5575506" data-attributes="member: 80487">I am not up on the scientific research, but here are some preliminary observations from what I have encountered in life:Someone with a deep revulsion toward violence will not in the first place find depiction of violence in any form entertaining. That level of sensitivity does not contain within it the motive for what purportedly leads to desensitization.People in their late 20s or older tend to be pretty well set in their ways. It's much easier to confirm their views and reinforce existing tendencies than to challenge them into change.Indoctrination of an adult is chiefly self-indoctrination. One chooses to associate with a given Us and be surrounded by the echoes of Our views, rather than to confront the views (already dismissed as wrong) of any Them. Just what one is really like behind closed doors, or when push comes to shove, might not be identical with one's public face, but taking into account the whole is likely to be informative."Taking into account the whole" is key. There is a lot of room between someone who assiduously cultivates a warlike frame of mind and someone who cultivates a pacifistic one! Most people fall somewhere in between.Most people, indeed, seem to find it pretty easy to turn away from violence done to others by others, to nurture the conviction that it's none of their business. When they or theirs are the victims, suddenly the sensitivity ramps up! This is such a commonplace that any further 'desensitization' in the former case would seem but a little thing.If an adult spends many hours on fetishisation of violence, or on racist or sexist propaganda, then it is most probably an expression of views already entrenched. It's a nurturing of a chosen frame of mind.Very young children, on the other hand, are supercharged learning machines guzzling information across a vast spectrum. Their codes of conduct are malleable because all they have at first is tension between mercy and justice, altruism and self-protection, and so on. They do not come into the world fearing all that we know they ought to fear, and yet they may fear things we know better than to fear.If all that is presented to a child is Lesson X, then it is unlikely to conceive of opposing View Y on its own and embrace it. More often, the balance of the arguments is telling. What "everyone knows" is typically really just what everyone who really matters says.</blockquote>

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