Kurt Lewin Award Recipient

Brad J. Bushman received his Ph.D. in 1989 from the University of Missouri. He is a professor of communication and psychology at The Ohio State University, where he holds the Rinehart Chair of Mass Communication. He is also a professor of communication science at the VU University Amsterdam. Previously, he was a professor at Iowa State University (1990-2003) and at the University of Michigan (2003-2010). For over 30 years he has studied aggression and violence. In the wake of the Newtown shooting, he co-chaired an advisory committee to the National Science Foundation on youth violence, which published a report that was distributed to each member of Congress and to each state Governor He also testified before Congress on the contents of the report. He served as a member of President Obama’s committee on gun violence, as an expert on media violence effects. He received the Distinguished Lifetime  Contribution to Media Psychology and Technology Award from the American Psychological Association in 2014. He has published about 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, which have been cited about 30,000 times. His research has challenged several myths (e.g., violent media have a trivial effect on aggression, venting anger reduces aggression, violent people suffer from low self-esteem, violence and sex sell products, warning labels reduce audience size). One of his colleagues even calls him the “myth buster.” His research has been repeatedly funded by federal grants (e.g., NSF, NIH), has been published in the top scientific journals (e.g., Science, PNAS), and has been featured extensively in the mass media (e.g., BBC, New York Times, NPR).