commodorecliche:

bitteroldfandomqueen:

toonlady:

“Peter Benchley’s Jaws caused a whole lot of Shark death”

Yes but is that his fault for writing it or should we blame the people that base their actions on a fictional book/movie??

People as a whole were already afraid of sharks at this point too. For the “Jaws Effect” to be applied to other fiction, there needs to be a mass miss/un-educated populace.

Did GoT’s treatment of young females lead to an upsurge in people marrying 13 year olds? No. Because we are educated about it. If the same the same thing had been a play a few hundred years ago, then it could have served to reinforce it was okay- because A) it was socially accepted, and B) it would be written in such a way the audience doesn’t feel bad for the girl

So. When an anti says “fiction about X will make people do X”, they are also implying the general populous already holds X to be acceptable.

There are a few great articles on the Jaws effect. This ones gives a good historical summary and also moves past the initial reaction.
http://www.livescience.com/8309-jaws-changed-view-great-white-sharks.html worth the quick read, but I’m just going to pull some bits out.

‘That began to change when a deadly rampage by a rogue great white shark on swimmers along the New Jersey shoreline and in a nearby creek during the summer of 1916 — attacks that helped inspire “Jaws,” Burgess noted.’

(my)Note: public perception lead to the inspiration for the movie. And their existing bias agaisnt sharks lead to not questioning the portrayal of sharks in the movie

’ “Perceptions especially changed during World War II, when a lot of people were put out to sea, and stories of shark attacks after ships or airplanes going down rose,” he explained. “So there was this stereotype of sharks being man-eaters that had to be looked out for.”

….

“The movie helped initiate that decline by making it sexy to go catch sharks,” Burgess said.

One inadvertent benefit linked with this calamitous drop in shark numbers was that scientists became aware of the need to learn more about sharks. This resulted in increased funding for shark research, improving our understanding of shark biology.

“Up until that point, there was virtually no funding for sharks, because they were not thought particularly interesting to humans, not being a major food fish — they were regularly regarded as a pest or nuisance that ate the baits or catches of commercial fishermen,” Burgess said.’

tl:dr the world is not always black and white, cause and effect.

Thisssssssss, this, all of this. 

And just to add to this: this is something I’ve talked about before, but in cases of things that aren’t considered to be socially acceptable (like murder/violence/rape/child marriage, etc…) – frequently, the only people fiction has been shown to affect are those who already had predispositions to find those things acceptable. 

The ability of fiction to influence reality depends so heavily on who the consumer of that media is. In the case of the Jaws effect, the general public’s opinions about sharks influenced the creation of the media, and the media (the book and subsequent films) in turn reinforced the general public’s preexisting opinions about sharks. 

But when it’s about something that we, the general public, know is unacceptable (like murder), the case changes. Books about murder don’t make the general public go out and murder people, because, like @bitteroldfandomqueen pointed out, it isn’t socially acceptable. We (the majority of the population) know better and know that murder/violence is wrong. But people who already have predispositions towards [socially unacceptable thing], or who already find that thing to be acceptable, have the potential to be inspired by it. But they are a minority of the population.

For example, Mark David Chapman using Catcher in the Rye as his “inspiration” for shooting John Lennon. 

It wasn’t Catcher in the Rye that caused Lennon’s death. It was Mark David Chapman. And if Chapman hadn’t found Catcher in the Rye and hadn’t been “inspired” by it, he would have found something else because he already considered killing someone to be something that was okay for him to do.  

Hundreds of thousands of people read that book every single year and you don’t see hoards of teens fleeing their English classes and rushing to assassinate “the phonies”. Violent video games like Grand Theft Auto don’t make kids suddenly think it’s okay to steal cars and run over pedestrians. Marilyn Manson wasn’t the reason Columbine happened. 

We don’t ban media simply because 0.00001% of the population might get inspired to do something bad – because when it comes to socially unacceptable things the majority of us know better. 

This is why I hate the extremes that these arguments hit: there are antis who spew shit like the Jaws Effect as if it’s proof that fiction undeniably always affects the reality of the entire population, and there are the people who deny that fiction could ever affect reality. Fiction absolutely can affect reality – but not in the way that antis think it does. And the degree to which it could affect people (large scale, in the case of the Jaws Effect when dealing with preexisting, preconceived opinions; or small scale, in the case of individuals who already find [bad thing] to be acceptable) depends heavily on the audience, its existing opinions, and how that fiction lines up with those preexisting notions. 

We don’t (should not, at least) blame the media for people doing bad things – we rightfully blame the people who commit those actions.