Other examples of the indication
of violence were words like “murder,” “stabbed,” or
“killed” that were removed from the nonviolent descriptions.
These episode descriptions were pretested
for perceived violence compared to their nonviolent
counterparts. Participants (N = 56) in a pretest read a
description and were asked how violent they thought
the show would be using a five-point scale: not at all
(0), a little (1), somewhat (2), a lot (3), or very (4).
t-tests showed that the violent plot descriptions were
perceived as significantly more violent than the nonviolent
plot descriptions for each of the four shows
(see Table I). Thus, the manipulation had the desired
effect. Moreover, the violence manipulation did not
influence how enjoyable the participants in the pretest
expected the show to be (Table I).