The importance of the null hypothesis in the formulation of theory in media psychology

Sixty years of media violence research illustrates what can go wrong when the null hypothesis is ignored. Without the null's restraining effect, researchers assumed that media violence could trigger behavioral aggression among all consumers. Thus researchers probed for types of aggression media violence motivated, not whether it motivated aggression in the first place. A null hypothesis, taken seriously, would have led to a nuanced, finer grained treatment of media violence's effects. Third variables such as background psychopathologies can interact with media violence to incite behavioral aggression among vulnerable consumers. Psychologically well individuals, on the other hand, appear to suffer no psychopathological effects. There is now pressure on social media scholars to ignore the null and assume that all users are pathologically vulnerable to social media. We show how seven methodological mistakes made it easy to quash the null and skip directly to presumed effects.