The television set as we know it today was invented by a 21-year-old man,

named Philo Taylor Farnsworth, who'd grown up in a log cabin without electricity.

His first broadcast was a straight line which went out on the airwaves in 1927.

By the mid-1940s, only about 6,000 U.S. homes had a TV set.

By 1954, just a year after the introduction of color TVs,

half of all Americans had a set.

At the start of the 21st century, the average American home had more than two TVs.

And in 2022, some of those TVs looked like artwork hanging on the wall.

And the more TV Americans watched, the more we worry about how it affects us.

Over the decades, Congress has held countless hearings and inquiries on the effects of TV, especially on kids.

In 1995, it passed the Television Violence Report Card Act,

which called for an assessment of the violence on broadcast and cable TV shows to be made public.

And separately, hundreds of studies over the years have suggested that violent programming causes aggressive behavior.

But does it?

What do we know about how television changes our behavior?

Studying the impact that television has on our lives is incredibly difficult,

because it's so hard to know whether TV is really the cause of the trouble.

Even after hundreds of studies, researchers still have questions about exactly how,

or even whether, TV changes us.

When it comes to television and behavior, do we really know what we think we know?

From the Freakonomics Rated Network, this is Freakonomics MD.

I'm Bob Ujena. I'm an economist, but I'm also a medical doctor.

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