Zakaria Shenwari

11A

How do movies or television influence people’s behavior? Use specific reason to explain your opinion.

How you ever noticed how many hours do you watch TV? In 2017 alone, an average U.S
consumer spent 3 hours and 58 minutes daily watching TV. When I was a kid, I used to turn on the TV
after I arrived home and I would stay in front of the TV for several hours. With the increase of TV
viewers, it is important to know about its influences on people’s behavior. Watching television and
movies influence people’s behavior both in good and bad ways.

What we learn determines our actions. We learn from many sources including television and
movies, and then we always try to practice what we see. For example, whenever I watch a movie, after
that, I start acting as the character in the movie I recently watched. In other words, I copy them. Usually
there are bad characters in a movie which do violent and unethical action. If people choose to copy
them, it would obviously influence them to bad actions. However, the actors are acting, which is not
real. But people are influenced to act as if it is reality. So indeed, TV impacts people’s behavior.

In addition, spending large amount of time on watching movies and televisions can be harmful
to our psychology. Researches have proved that the more time we spend on watching television the
more our brain becomes dull and inactive. The dullness of brain has huge influence on people’s
emotional and physical state.

On the other hand, television and movies are good source for learning through fun. There are
many television programs made for kids to learn languages and science through animations. This
influences the kids’ behavior to enjoy learning. Moreover, television and movies are a great source of
exhibition of cultures, languages, art and news of different countries of the world. Everyone, specifically
those interested to learn about other cultures, can watch documentaries about countries easily through
a screen. People don’t need to travel to other places to learn about the people and culture. So this
influence people’s perspective to consider watching television as a source of learning rather than time-
wasting.

According to the above reasons, movies and television influence people’s behavior both in good
and bad ways. Largely it depend on people what they are watching, how long they spend on watching
and what they learn from them.