Professional wrestling affects behavior both unintentionally and intentionally; viewers believe in the reality of the scripted movements and therefore emulate their heroes.

Such belief in the reality of actions expressed on the professional wrestling broadcasts represents an opportunity to misunderstand the violence portrayed by wrestlers on RAW, Smackdown, and other professional wrestling television programs.

The most obvious knock against professional wrestling in the industry’s role in television violence is the thought by many that wrestling is savage.

Many scholars have condemned professional wrestling, “for lacking any human dignity in its portrayal of violence and for fostering fighting among impressionable youth.” (Tamborini 2).

Scholars are not the only ones who feel this way as professional wrestling in all forms have been routinely condemned by many other fields, most of whom have never actually watched the programming that World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) or other promotions such as Total Non-Stop Action Wrestling (TNA) have put on television.

In a 2002 professional study on the violence in professional wrestling, the researchers studied 10 hours of WWE programming, including both the company’s RAW and Smackdown programs.

At the conclusion of the study, the researchers stated that all past studies on professional wrestling violence had failed in that the researchers, for the 2002 study “[knew] little about the manner in which it [professional wrestling] portrays violence” (Tamborini 2).

The fact that all researchers, including the writers of the 2002 study, are missing is that the world of professional wrestling is that of scripted storylines and of sports fiction. The violence that just the casual fan or critic of the sport sees is a “fight” that was weeks or months in the making.

Such ignorance of such intricacies of professional wrestling culture, such as seeing violence and assuming that the wrestlers and the fans are savage because of the media’s outdated views on the over-the-top, bloody sport, partaken by overweight and out-of-shape men that many remember from the 1980’s, increase, in critics' minds, the amount of violence found on WWE programming.

In addition, to a vastly overexaggerated view of wrestling violence by many in the media and various conservative parent groups and civilians, the fact remains that comparative violence on nationally broadcast network television shows are worse in the percentage of violence shown.

The scholarly study referenced before also stated, “The results [of the study] showed that 16 percent of violent interactions in wrestling result in unrealistic harm, compared to 24 percent in … [network television] primetime programs…” (Tamborini 14).

This statistic contradicts common American feelings on professional wrestling, where wrestling is in fact less violent then primetime network programs which are on at the same time as WWE and other wrestling programs, but escape most of the ire that parental groups put on the WWE and other related professional wrestling organizations.

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