Were Your Childhood Cartoons Secretly Shaping Your Personality? Research Raises a Fascinating Question

Could the cartoons we watched as children leave traces in the way we trust, communicate, empathise and relate to others as adults? A recent human behaviour study offers some intriguing clues.

Rachmanas Counseling

September 26, 2026

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Could the cartoons we watched as children leave traces in the way we trust, communicate, empathise and relate to others as adults? A recent human behaviour study offers some intriguing clues.

Think back to the cartoons you watched as a child.

Did you spend afternoons with Tom and Jerry? Were you more drawn to Caillou, Scooby-Doo, SpongeBob, Winx or Ninja Turtles?

At the time, they were simply cartoons. Something to watch after school, usually while eating a snack and avoiding homework with impressive commitment.

But could those stories have influenced the way we learned about relationships?

A 2024 study by Aydın, Duman and Ergiyen examined precisely this question. The researchers studied 211 young adults aged 18 to 28 in Türkiye and looked at childhood cartoon exposure, positive childhood experiences and interpersonal relationship patterns.

The results are interesting, although they need to be read carefully.

What did the researchers find?

Around 70% of participants reported watching cartoons classified by the researchers as containing violent content during childhood. More than half reported watching cartoons for two to three hours a day.

The researchers then examined whether these childhood viewing patterns were associated with later interpersonal characteristics.

One finding stood out immediately: the amount of time spent watching cartoons was not significantly associated with positive childhood experiences or the measured interpersonal relationship dimensions.

So, simply watching cartoons for longer did not appear to explain differences in adult relationships.

Content produced a more complicated picture.

Participants who had watched certain cartoons classified as violent showed differences in approval dependence, positive childhood experiences and emotional awareness. Those who had watched certain nonviolent cartoons also showed differences in empathy and other interpersonal measures.

For example, participants who reported watching Nane and Limon had higher empathy scores than those who did not. Participants who had watched Caillou showed lower approval dependence.

Several cartoons, including Regular Show, Gumball and SpongeBob, were associated with lower positive childhood experience scores among viewers.

Does this mean these cartoons caused poorer childhood experiences?

No.

That distinction matters.

The study used a correlational design. Participants also had to remember what they watched during childhood, which introduces the possibility of recall bias. The sample was relatively small, gender distribution was uneven, and the researchers themselves noted that the cartoons were not equally represented across their violent and nonviolent categories.

In other words, the findings give us relationships between variables. They do not give us a simple cause-and-effect story.

Why might cartoons matter at all?

One possible explanation comes from Social Learning Theory.

Albert Bandura proposed that people can learn by observing others, including behaviours, emotional responses and social patterns. His famous experiments demonstrated that children can imitate behaviour displayed by adult models.

Later work also showed that symbolic models, including those presented through media, can become sources of observational learning.

That raises an interesting question.

What happens when the characters a child watches every day repeatedly solve problems through aggression, cooperation, humour, negotiation or empathy?

A child does not necessarily copy a cartoon character literally. Learning can be subtler.

A child may observe who gets rewarded. Who gets ignored. Who apologises. Who uses humour to manage conflict. Who helps another character. Who wins an argument by shouting.

Over thousands of small observations, these scenes may become part of a child’s understanding of what social behaviour looks like.

But cartoons are only one influence.

Parents, siblings, teachers, friends, neighbourhoods, culture, temperament and actual experiences all compete for attention in the development of social behaviour. A child may watch an aggressive cartoon and still learn very different lessons because a parent discusses what happened on screen.

Another child may watch a prosocial programme without receiving much real-world reinforcement for those behaviours.

The relationship between media and development is therefore unlikely to be as simple as “violent cartoons create aggressive adults.”

The more interesting finding may be what the study does not show

The study found no significant differences based simply on daily viewing time.

That is worth noticing.

Two children can spend the same amount of time watching television and have very different developmental experiences. What they watch, how they understand it, what happens around the viewing experience and what they learn from real relationships may all matter.

The study also found significant correlations between positive childhood experiences and several interpersonal dimensions, including approval dependence, trust and emotional awareness.

That brings us to a larger psychological question.

Perhaps the important issue is not whether a cartoon “made” someone a certain way. It may be how childhood experiences, relationships and repeated social observations gradually interact.

A cartoon character can model a behaviour. A parent can reinforce or challenge it. A teacher can provide another example. A friendship can teach something completely different.

By adulthood, separating these influences becomes almost impossible.

That is why the findings should be treated as a starting point rather than a verdict on childhood television.

Your favourite cartoon probably did not secretly write your personality.

But it may have been one small voice among many teaching you what friendship, conflict, kindness, trust and even winning were supposed to look like.

And perhaps that is the more useful question to ask when we look back at the television of our childhood:

What did we learn from the characters we watched, and which of those lessons are we still carrying today?

References

Aydın, M. E., Duman, N., & Ergiyen, Z. (2024). Examining the relationship between cartoon watching in childhood and positive childhood experiences and interpersonal relationships in young adulthood. Uluslararası Çocuk Edebiyatı ve Eğitim Araştırmaları Dergisi (ÇEDAR), 7(2), 1–18.
Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Prentice-Hall.
Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961). Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63(3), 575–582.