In his Mind in the Making, James Harvey Robinson wrote: "There are four historical layers underlying the minds of men-the animal mind, the child mind, the savage mind and the traditional civilized mind. . . . Their hold on us is really inexorable. . . . We are all children at our most impressionable age."

That was written twelve years ago but it might have been a preview of the four-year study of the effects of the screen on American minds in the making, initiated by the Motion Picture Research Council and made by the Payne Fund through its Educational Research Committee of psychologists and sociologists. The findings, to be published in ten Volumes, give one the feeling that Prof. W. W. Charters of Ohio State 'University and his associates have reversed the projector and thrown on the screen a series of life-size movies of the rows of boys and girls who look on.

Their "films" feature the great child audience; how often they --go to the pictures"; what they see; what kind of life is portrayed for them; how much of it they remember; how it affects their sleep, habits, nerves; what goals it holds up; how it conditions behavior. In a word, what we may expect of children who are exposed to run-of-the-mill motion pictures every week.

From almost their beginning the movies have been under attack from two sources: from parents who sensed that their children were being injured by what they saw; from grown-ups who felt that they were being gypped by commercial producers who were using a form of art but using it on a basis of mass production--films geared at that meanest of common denominators, the twelve-year-old mind in adults. Here at last we have the facts as to the children.

The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America claimed in good times a weekly attendance of 115 million of whom, they said, 5 to 8 percent were children. Evenly spread, that was practically one movie a week for every one of us. The Payne Research Committee by counting, sampling, estimating and other accredited research processes got a total possible audience of 105 millions, a national weekly attendance of 77 millions of whom 36 percent were children and adolescents. That is, a youngster sits in every third seat.  He chooses to sit there by himself, particularly if he is a boy. At all ages one quarter of the boys prefer to go without companions, sitting alone, daydreaming in the dark. Up to the age of eight this average boy is accompanied by a parent 23 percent of the time-, at the age of nine, 16 percent; at eleven, 10 percent. Children almost never leave before the show is over. Indeed 25 percent of the boys and 22 percent of the girls stay on for at least a part of the next showing.

In a study of five- to-eight-year-olds the average attendance was found to be twenty-two times a year. Another study, acres eight to nineteen, gave a weekly attendance of 35 155 among 35,491 youngsters. The yearly average for the girls in this large group was forty-six shows; for the boys, fifty-seven; for the two combined, almost precisely one a week. Fifty-two shows of three films each gave them, on the average, 156 films a year.
The films they saw were what the rest of us see, for practically no special films are made for children (there was just one in 1930). What they pored over were films dealing chiefly with romantic love, sex and crime; films that give a cock-eyed picture of the world. Seventy-five percent of all the characters shown were between nineteen and forty years of age, a full half of them under thirty. Of the adult actors, only 15 percent were married (in the plot) as against 60 percent in the general population. There are no workers in this movie world, except the servants of the rich and the cowboys in the Wild Westerns; no agriculture; no manufacturing; no poverty.. In a group of 115 films, 33 percent of the heroes, 44 percent of the heroines, 54 percent of the villains and 63 percent of the female of that species were wealthy or ultra-wealthy. In 73 percent, formal dress figured heavily. Indeed there appears to be a group of young men in Hollywood who have set out seriously to "save" the high silk hat.

But with their sensitiveness to the moral implications of their findings. the Committee has more to say of habits than of habiliments. In this group of 115 films, 66 percent showed drinking, 43 percent intoxication and 78 percent contained "liquor situations."

But again this is only the beginning of the Committee's concern. In a study of 1500 films in three selected years (500 each year), Prof. Edgar Dale. psychologist. of Ohio State University, found that crime, sex and love were the subjects of 82 percent of all feature films in 1920, 88 percent in 1925, 72 percent in 1930. But the falling off in 1930 was more apparent than real for there was a new 9 percent on mystery, and war in which violence always and crime often appeared. So the child, at his weekly average show, saw fifty-two feature films of which thirty-nine these three subjects. Professors Charters and Dale, writing together, point out:  Literally hundreds of times one notes there a portrayal of character and conduct which gives a totally erroneous notion of the situation or event as it actually occurs in real life. A mature adult in ,who has had a wide range of experience can at once discount in some degree what he has seen on the screen. Not so the children.  Professor Dale analyzed 115 films taken at random. In them he counted seventy-one deaths in forty-five films, 21 percent of them caused by the hero, 40 percent by the villain, the others accomplished in various ways. Only one was by a heroine. For good measure there were thrown in fifty-nine cases of assault and battery, seventeen hold-ups, twenty-one kidnappings; 406 crimes were pulled off and 43 others were attempted-a total of 449 crimes in 115 films.
Such an orgy of battle, murder and sudden death must have been exciting to every child. But not all of them liked it. The Committee has collected a large number of replies to the question asked of children, nine to thirteen, if they ever disliked motion pictures and if so why. "Killing" held a prominent place in the answers, such as the nine-year-old who wrote, "Killing looks offel. scares me," and another, "Hate to see people killed: makes me sick."

Much of the crime, of course. is no more than a realistic reflection of our times. But it was not made unattractive. On the contrary, some of the most winning actors were cast in criminal parts: Jack Holt as the leader of a gang of outlaws; Lawrence Tibbet out for private vengeance; Edmund Lowe as a gambler and robber; Victor McLaglan, Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich carrying on gaily and courageously outside the law.
And as to punishment for crime, Professor Dale made it detailed analysis of forty pictures in which fifty-seven criminals committed sixty-two crimes, with the following results:  Three of the fifty-seven were arrested and held; four were arrested but released; seven were arrested and their punishment was inferred. In one group of five, three were arrested, one gave himself up; another's arrest was inferred and all were legally punished. Twenty-two criminals were punished by what may be described as extralegal methods-by their own henchmen, other gangsters and in a variety of ways in which the law had nothing to do. In seventeen cases the punishment was primarily accidental and fifteen crimes went wholly unpunished. Some of the unpunished crimes were: murder by the hero, as in Rogue Son; kidnapping by the hero, as in Devil May Care; kidnapping by the villain, as in Along Came Youth; embezzlement by the hero, as in Six-Cylinder Love; embezzlement by the heroine, as in Miracle Woman, and housebreaking by the hero in the same picture. . . . Surely children and youths need assistance in interpreting such motion pictures. Many parents believe that they should not be seen at all.

Nowhere was an attempt made to show the reaction to environment, the attrition of evil companionship, the slow cumulative process by which a criminal is made.  The goals pursued by the handsome young actors varied, but twelve goals accounted for 385 out of a total of 400. In order of frequency they were: winning another love, marriage for love, professional success, revenge, crime for gain, illicit love, thrills or excitement, conquering 3 rival, financial success, enjoyment, concealment of guilt, marriage for money. Only 9 percent of all goals seemed to Professor Dale to be socially desirable in nature. He says:

It is apparent that children will rarely secure from the films goals of the type that have animated men like Jenner, Lister, Koch, Pasteur, Thomas Aquinas, Jesus Christ, Aristotle, Norman Thomas, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Plato, Socrates, Grenfell, Edison, Noguchi, Lincoln, Washington and others; and women like Jane Addams, Frances Willard, Susan B. Anthony, Grace Abbott, Madame Curie, Clara Barton, Florence Nightingale and Dorothy Canfield Fisher. . . .We ought to expect the cinema to show a better way of living than the average find outside the cinema. . . . We need to see the screen portraying more of the type of social goals which ought to be characteristic of a decent civilization. We need more often to catch a glimpse of the immortality of great characters who have sacrificed opportunities for personal aggrandizement in order that the larger community might have a fuller measure of life.

While one group of the Committee thus turning the subjects of the films inside out, another was measuring how well children remember them. This study was carried out chiefly by Prof. P. W. Holaday of Iowa State University, a psychologist, under the direction of Dr. George D. Stoddard, head of the Iowa State Child Welfare Station. A careful selection was made of representative films and an intricate set of questions based on them were put to some three thousand young people in Iowa and Ohio, grouped by ages: five-and-six-year-olds, eight-and- nine-year-olds, highschool pupils, and young adults, either graduate students or junior members of the faculty and their wives. The questions were of a sort to be understood easily. It was made clear that the purpose of the inquiry was not to see who could remember most. The auditors were asked to sit in just their usual way and not to be especially intent on memorizing the things they saw.
The result was a sweepstakes for the kids. They remembered things in every category, good and bad, accurate and misinforming, with the indiscriminate fidelity of little cameras. Thus from Ben Hur they greatly increased their accurate information on Palestine, on Roman togas and chariots; but from a Western film, Fighting Caravans, they got an equal amount of misinformation, for example, a tankcar of kerosene drawn across the prairies in 1861 before either kerosene or tank-cars were in use.

Each of the twenty-six memory tests included from thirty to sixty-four items such as, what was the first present Tom Sawyer received for letting a boy whitewash the fence--a watch, whistle, dead cat, compass, a tooth? Or (after seeing Rango), do the native huts in Sumatra have roofs of slate, grass, bark, boards, shingles? Tested the next day the eight-nine-year-olds remembered 60 percent as much as the adults. Tested without warning six weeks later, the second -and-third grade children remembered 91 percent of what they had learned from the picture, the fifth-sixth graders 90 percent, the highschool children 88 percent and the young adults 82 percent. Tested again after three months the results were practically unchanged except that, if anything, the youngest group remembered, or at any rate were able to state, more of what they had observed at the end of three months than at the end of twenty-four hours. There was no difference between school children and children a detention home. They all remembered pretty nearly everything they had seen and they kept right on remembering it. "My private guess," says Dr. Holaday, "is that pictures play a considerably larger part in the child's imagination than do books."

What movies do to a child's sleep was measured accurately by a device known as a hypnograph. Prof. Samuel Renshaw and Dr. Vernon L. Miller at the Ohio State Bureau of Juvenile Research employed it with 170 boys and girls ranging in age from six to eighteen years. All of the children were normal and well and without unusual I.Q.'s. The Bureau children were used for the experiment because of the regular, controlled and healthy lives they live.

The hypnograph, attached to the bedsprings, records on a ribbon every movement made by a sleeper. In making the tests, each child's normal motility (restlessness) was first recorded and charted over a number of nights. Then, on the theory that any excitement in the evening might show up on the hypnograph, the whole group was taken on an expedition of window-shopping through the brightly lighted streets for a length of time about equal to a movie program. Then they were put to bed--and the result was negative.  The next night they were marched off to the early show, stayed for the usual program of two hours (the pictures were not selected, but were the current neighborhood offering,) and sent to bed at the usual time. And then the hypnograph told the story. There was an enormous individual difference, but all the children showed some effect and in some records the needle fairly jittered. A boy of eight, after seeing Movietone Follies of 1930, had double his usual restlessness; a boy of ten the same change after seeing Strictly Unconventional. Remote Control increased an eight-year-old boy's motility 13 percent, a twelve-year old boy's 62 percent; that of a girl of twelve, 85 percent, but of three girls of eight, sixteen and eighteen only 20 percent. A girl of sixteen, after seeing Just Imagine, shot up by 90 percent, virtually doubling her usual restlessness. Billy the Kid, the story of a swashbuckling killer with plenty of gunplay, caused only one boy in fifteen to register an increase of 50 percent above usual motility, while two thirds of the girls recorded more than half again their normal wiggles, and one of the girls went up by 75 Percent.

The general average increase for the boys was 26 percent and for the girls 14 percent. A degree of disturbance tended to linger on for four or five nights. The most extreme effects seemed to come at about the age of puberty. Says Dr. Renshaw: "For certain highly sensitive or weak and unstable children the best hygienic policy would be to recommend very infrequent attendance and then only at carefully selected films."

What goes on during the performance was studied by another group of the Committee. Here the gauge was not motility, but motivity--–the intensity of emotion. Christian S. Ruckmick, professor of psychology at the University of Iowa, and his assistant, Prof. Wendell S. Dysinger, employed the psychogalvanometer. Their subjects were chiefly children from the public schools of Iowa City from six to eighteen years of age with I.Q.'s from 90 to 110. Some adults were included for purposes of comparison. Using, Hop to It Bellhop, a humorous picture without tenseness, the experimenters found that their adolescent subjects registered twice the excitement of the adults and the youngest group, children of six to eleven, three times as much. Here, as in other experiments, there were marked individual variations. Some children of thirteen to fifteen gave a zero reading while one member of the same group registered five times the reaction of the adults. The movies used in this experiment were not thrillers but of the everyday sort.

At the same time and with the same subjects, a record was made of pulse-rates against the previously established norm of the subjects. Children with a normal beat of 75 to 80 ran up to 125 and 140 at the more exciting points in these films. At a prison scene in The Yellow Ticket, one boy of sixteen jumped from 80 to 154. His pulse beat practically at double speed. Dr. T. B. Horrian of Kansas City, making a special experiment on a carefully chosen normal subject, a young woman of twenty-two, found that in ordinary films her pulse changed from 80 to 140, while a thriller like The Mysterious Dr. Fu-Manchu gave readings of 150, 168, and, in one particularly harrowing scene, it registered 192.

Speaking not of this individual case but of the general experiments on emotional reaction and pulse-beat, Professor Dysinger says: They are sitting quiet; there is no chance to express the emotion in motivity; yet they are intensely stimulated. Such a situation is bad for health, represents a deplorable mental hygiene and might easily contribute to the habits which are popularly called "nervousness" in children. Where the boy or girl has a chance to work off emotions in the open, in exercise or play, it is splendid. Such excitement in a darkened theater is by no means splendid.

Dr. Frederick Peterson, the distinguished neurologist of New York City, made the following comment to Henry James Forman, the author of the general volume, when asked how injurious he thought scenes of horror and tense excitement might be:  If sufficiently strong they have an effect very similar to shellshock such as soldiers received in war. A healthy child seeing a picture once in a while will suffer no harm. But repeating the stimulation often amounts to emotional debauch. Stimulation, when often repeated, is cumulative. Scenes causing horror and fright are sowing the seeds in the system for future neuroses and psychoses -nervous disorders.
These tests were made with quite ordinary films such as run nightly in neighborhood playhouses. No accurtests were made on the thrillers, but the Committee gives the first-hand testimony of a mature woman (a registered nurse, the widow of a pediatrician who had herself read some medicine) who has charge of children's playrooms and first-aid rooms in a string of theaters in Chicago. While Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera was running there were so many faintings and hysterical collapses that the ushers were specially drilled in handling them. Throughout the run there was an average of four faintings a day; on one day eleven people fainted, four of them men. One woman had a miscarriage. Children became hysterical: "I have had as many as three in my arms at once and it required an hour or more to quiet them. They were generally children six to eight years old." Wild West and war films often had a similar effect, she testified; during The Dawn Patrol she saw children leap from their seats and scream with excitement.

Prof. Herbert Blumer of Chicago collected a great number of individual cases of horror and shock. Out of 458 highschool autobiographies, 61 percent stated that they had at some time been terrified by a scene in a movie. Ninety-three percent of 237 younger school children answered "yes" when asked if they had ever been terrified. A girl of thirteen related how she was taken shrieking from her first movie, as a small child, and did not get over it for years. A college girl of twenty still can describe vividly her childish impression of "a horrible hairy ape with a habit of breaking into people's houses." A child of eight had nightmares for a month after seeing Tarzan of the Apes. A girl of fourteen "was so frightened by The Phantom of the Opera I could not scream. . . I could not move for two or three minutes." A college youth reported that it was two or three years before he got over a fear of dark places inspired by a boyhood viewing of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A young woman of twenty was so upset by seeing a presentation of  Dante's Inferno that she did not enter a theater again for several years. Out of a class of forty-four students, thirty-eight told of being frightened and thirty-one of these went back for more punishment-they liked it. Of his highschool students, 64 percent reported "irresistible weeping" at pictures such as The Singing Fool, Beau Geste, Over the Hill and Coquette. One could go on indefinitely quoting Dr. Blumer's stories.

Unusually interesting measurements of changes in social attitudes were made by Prof. L. I. Thurstone of the University of Chicago and his assistant, Ruth C. Peterson. They found a Midwestern community of 5700 people, all whites: a town where almost no child had even seen a Negro. They tested the school children and found them practically without race prejudice. Then they arranged that the anti-Negro film, The Birth of a Nation, which has been revived with sound, should be shown in the town, and tested them again. Race prejudice had grown like a weed. Five months later, without a second showing of the film, 62 percent of the prejudice remained and it was still markedly present after eight months.

The film Four Sons, which is anti-war and friendly to the German people, completely changed the attitude toward Germans held by junior and senior highschool pupils tested before and after seeing it. The change persisted at another test five months later. A Chinese film, Son of the Gods, had a similar effect on 117 highschool children in another town. Five hundred children who saw The Valiant, which opposed capital punishment, promptly reacted against the death sentence. The Criminal Code gave other children a more lenient attitude toward the punishment of crime and All Quiet on the Western Front registered strongly antiwar. Two films on similar themes, for instance The Big House and Numbered Men, were found to have more effect than one, and three films more than two-a distinctly cumulative effect. 

Evidence of the effects of the movies on juvenile behavior is clear, both statistically and in the poignant statements made to Professor Blumer by children from many social groups, from neighborhoods rated as good, fair and of high delinquency; from children in public schools, detention homes and prisons. There is unquestionable evidence that some movies have a "good" effect, as in the case of the girl who saw Over the Hill and vowed she would see to it that her mother should never go to the poorhouse, or the boys who got a vision of service from seeing Ben Hur or Sorrell and Son. But for children already breaking away from home restraints the "good" impressions were short-lived; on the average, they lasted about a month. Schoolgirls who had already had sex experience usually kept new "good" resolves only until they next met an attractive boy who "propositioned" them.

The desire to be a Robin Hood, robbing the rich and giving to the poor, seems to move many schoolboys, and the desire to make easy money stirred one fifth of the boys in a good neighborhood. This desire, specifically stated by many boys, leads Professor Blumer to comment: "The creation of desires for riches and suggestions for easily realizing them may dispose many and lead some to criminal behavior... The gist of the "good" and the "bad" in the way of suggestion seems to be that the good is infrequent and fleeting, the bad (easy money, incitement to crime.. and glorification of crime) constant, cumulative and to some children almost irresistible. A boy convicted of robbery said: "As I became older the luxuries of life showed in the movies, partly, made me want to possess them. I could not on the salary I was earning." Another: "The ideas I got from the movies about easy money were from watching pictures where the hero never worked but seemed always to have lots of money to spend. . . . I thought it would be great to live that kind of life." In a group of truants and boys with behavior problems, 55 percent said that pictures of gangsters stirred them to want to go and do likewise.
A boy of eighteen, sentenced to a reformatory for robbery and rape, made this statement:

I would see in a picture the "Big Shot" come in a cabaret. Everyone would greet him with a smile. The girls would all crowd around him. He would order wine and food for the girls. Tip the waiter $50 or more. After dining and dancing he would give the girls diamond bracelets, rings and fur coats. Then he would leave and go to meet his gang. They would all bow down to him and give him the dough that was taken from different rackets. When I would see pictures like this I would go wild and say that some day I would be a "Big Shot" that everyone would be afraid of, and have big dough. Live like a king without doing any work.

Beyond the suggestion inherent in the plots, the gangster pictures show boys who want to learn how to do criminal things. Consider these sentences from different boys and young men:

Movies have shown me the way of stealing automobiles, the charge for which I am now serving sentence.
Some of the movies I saw showed me how to jimmy a door or window.
We learned from the movies how to use a glass cutter and master key.
I learned from the movies the scientific way of pulling jobs-leave no fingerprints or telltale marks.
The first stick-up I ever saw was in a movie and I seen how it was done.
I learned something from The Gateway to Hell. It is a gangster picture. It shows how to drown out shots from a gun by backfiring a car.

Professor Blumer made a list of thirty-one such specific bits of training in burglary which young fellows in prison told him they had learned from watching gangster pictures. A number of boys, now serving sentences, relate how they not only got the idea and the technique of robbery from a picture, but were so fired by what they had seen that they went out at the end of the performance and tried it on a neighborhood store.
Of 110 young men in a prison, 49 percent said that the movies had first created in them the desire to carry a gun, 28 percent a desire to pull off a hold-up, 21 percent on how to fool the police, 12 percent that a picture of a successful "job" at once stirred them to do it too. A study made in a polyglot high-delinquency area of New York City by Prof. Frederic M. Thrasher of New York University throws many of these points into high relief. Among children with a tendency toward crime, the gangster pictures act like gasoline poured on a smoldering log. The boys make heroes of the "Big Shots" on the screen and swagger through the crowded streets dressed like James Cagney, or demand that their friends call them "Little Casear" after the gang play by that name.

The studies of movies and sex can be only referred to here. John Galsworthy once said that sex is such powerful stuff it must be used in writing only in minute doses lest it throw everything else out of perspective. The movies have learned that lesson,--and use it in reverse. Testimony from boys and girls of every class is overwhelming. A highschool girl states: "The only benefit I ever got from the movies was in learning to love and a knowledge of sex. When I was about twelve years old I started browsing around and I remember I used to advantage my knowledge of how to love, to be loved, and how to respond." A college boy of twenty: "Heated love scenes like those that took place between John Gilbert and Greta Garbo led indirectly in association with my own sexual cravings to my first visit to a 'sport' woman." Another college student: "When I see John Gilbert making love to Greta Garbo I observe, and when I have a girl of my own there is no doubt that I make use of his technique in playing with her. What is more, I think girls copy movie actresses in the same manner." Heard in a group of office girls: "Say, have you seen John Gilbert and Greta Garbo in Love? Why when he kissed her I was so thrilled I almost passed out. Oh for a man like that!" In a group of sorority girls: "Without him [a French count] even saying a word, you could tell by the expression on his face what he thought. Boy, he certainly could love. I would like to have him for a fellow for just one night."One of Professor Thrasher's investigators copied this poster:  Married just Enough to Make Her Interesting! It's New! It's Original! It's Different! It starts with a bang as Madame loses her dress! It leaps into high as her lover hires a sin-thetic wife! It reaches an amazing height amid the love gondolas of Venice! It's peppery in Paris! It's intimate in Italy! Which all means that it's Hot-Cha in good old U. S. A. Snappy as a French magazine.

It must appear from even this brief sampling that the Motion Picture Research Council has ventilated scientifically and inexorably one of the major educational problems of our time. It makes us realize that the youngsters in the seats down front see things that we miss and carry away things which we had wiped out with an "adult discount." It announces that after the completion of the studies and the publication of the results it will "make recommendations in connection with the use of the film art."

Nothing tried thus far--National Board of Review, state censorships, laws barring children from theaters-has accomplished the Committee's purpose. The spirit of the times and of the courts is distinctly away from legal censorship. The obvious plan, of keeping children away from films that might injure them, does not work in crowded city neighborhoods where driven tenement mothers have little control over their children. There remains the possibility of public pressure on the movie producers to play the game with the parents of America, to have a heart for the children. To such appeals they might more readily give ear in a time of dwindling audiences and of receiverships than they did at the crest of their gilded wave. In hard times, with the need of getting new ticket buyers in their seats, it might seem to them good sense to reach out for public approval and for films that would interest distinctive groups.

Now there are at least three kinds of films: films intrinsically suited to children, to adults with child-minds, to true adults. The third group goes only rarely to the movies; it does not begin to live up to the Payne Committee's average attendance of three quarters of a movie per person per week; it has been figured another connection that there are fifty to sixty million grown-ups who go seldom if ever. And the chief reason that they do not is that the movies bore them to the verge of tears. Yet if they we offered something interesting, they would go to the movies, with discrimination, as they go to the theater and buy books. And films they would go to see surely would be more suitable for children than the sex and gangster plays that cater to child-minded adults.
If the Motion Picture Research Council can work out a program it may find unexpected public support from those who not only deplore the evil effects of movies upon youth with its mind in process of making, but resent the boredom to grown-ups with minds already made--and made up to go to the movies or to stay home according to the table of contents.

Source:  Survey Graphic Volume XXII no. 5 (May, 1933)