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Video Racing Games May Spur Risky Driving
kiwimate writes "A study concludes that people who play car racing games may be more likely to take risks and drive aggressively when driving in real life.
According to the article, "The study appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, published by the American Psychological Association"." Just because after I play Grand Theft Auto I want to ram other cars does not mean I'm a worse driver. Honest.
This is a pretty stupid assertion.
Wouldn't the people most likely to enjoy this genre be predisposed to this behaviour?
Why don't these "researchers" understand the importance of self-selection?!?
And who, according to insurance companies, is the riskiest group? Teenage boys.
Next study! People who date teenage girls are risky drivers!
People who play racing car games may be more likely to be seagulls.
Question everything
Crashing constantly in GTA actually makes me more careful by fear of having as many accidents as in GTA
You just got troll'd!
watching 'care bears' for an extended period of time will make you a more caring and sensitive person.
Any time i see the 'video games made me do it' excuse, I think that the appropriate sentence should be forced to watch 'Barney' for an entire month. Since the person is so easily influenced, this should work perfectly for rehabilitation.
I've seen this after movies too. I remember well seeing "Gone in 60 seconds" (when it came out, long ago) and then watching all the idiots do burn-outs from the theatre and go peeling out. The funny thing was that apparently the cops were aware of this too, so they had some cars strategically placed after the shows ended.
Of course one could still bring up the cause->effect arguement, as it's unclear as to whether or not people drive like idiots due to game/movie influence, or people who drive like idiots like those types of games/movies.
Well, there was that time I patronized a hooker, then immediately afterward bludgeoned her to death, and plucked the money I paid her from where it was floating in the air several inches above her slowly vanishing corpse... wait, that was years before GTA came out. Never mind.
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I played GTA pretty seriously for awhile. The sense of freedom was amazing.
When I first played (and when my wife first played), we tried to obey the traffic laws and stay in the proper lane. After realizing how pointless that was, we were driving on sidewalks, ignoring pedestrians, and laughing with glee when running red lights.
Your brain is very good at unlearning old skills and relearning new ones. The catch is that when doing very similar things, it's easy for one set of skills to bleed into another. Switching from throwing a whiffle ball to a softball requires a period of adjustment. Driving like an insane maniac to a law abiding citizen requires a degree of concentration.
The vast majority of people will likely use caution, focus, and not have any problem at all. Some folks, however, may have difficulty making the switch. Ban all driving games? That seems a bit silly. Banning cell phones or music in cars would likely have a more concrete effect.
I'm a keen driver, and a strong advocate of road safety, so I've looked at a fair bit of the research that's available. Most variables that have been found to affect driver attitude are based on something that is happening while they're actually in the car: things like tiredness, drink and drugs obviously have an effect, but so do things like the type (actually, speed) of music you're listening to. (Some groups of drivers also generally exercise better judgement regardless of the immediate circumstances: to find out who, take a look at what counts for/against you when your insurance premium is worked out!)
Then again, perception of speed is also affected by recent experience: think how slow it feels when you come off a high speed road into a town, even if you're doing the limit around town, and compare that with how that limit feels when you're just starting driving and already in town. That's perception rather than attitude and judgement, though.
So while the conclusions here seem plausible, they're also a bit unusual. I saw a story very similar to this a few days ago in the UK media. Anyone know if these are all the same thing, or there's a recent research trend generating several sets of results in quick succession?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Look, this is ridiculous.
If people thought playing computer games would affect your actions in real life, then all those hours of PacMan would have had us running around in darkened rooms listening to repetitive music munching on pills.
Oh wait....
Say it with me: Correlation does not imply causation.
Yes, it does!
What it doesn't do is prove causation. Of course it implies causation. Then you investigate that implication.
Really.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
It's pretty lame that they're trying to blame GTA for stuff like that. I was beating up hookers and taking their money *way* before GTA came out.
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