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Gamers Are More Aggressive To Strangers
TheClockworkSoul writes "According to NewScientist, victorious gamers enjoy a surge of testosterone — but only if their vanquished foe is a stranger. Interestingly, when male gamers beat friends in a shoot-em-up video game, their levels of the hormone plummeted. This suggests that multiplayer video games tap into the same mechanisms as warfare, where testosterone's effect on aggression is advantageous. Against a group of strangers — be it an opposing football team or an opposing army – there is little reason to hold back, so testosterone's effects on aggression offer an advantage. 'In a serious out-group competition you can kill all your rivals and you're better for it,' says David Geary, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, who led the study. However, when competing against friends or relatives to establish social hierarchy, annihilation doesn't make sense. 'You can't alienate your in-group partners, because you need them,' he says."
If all y'alls weren't such retards, you'd have asked that question already. Suck it, LUUUUSERS.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I find that I feel bad if I kill someone on my own team by accident.
Then I feel better when I teabag them anyway. Laughter is definitely the best medicine.
I play with my co-workers at lunchtime. I can tell you I get no satisfaction from killing them... none at all *looks shiftilly around*
*STAB STAB STAB STAB*
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
It sounds like they are counting gamers as 'people who play games online' which naturally biases the sample towards people who enjoy beating strangers. I enjoyed LAN gaming a lot, but never got in to online FPS games because beating some random person who may or may not be a bot (or using various cheats) didn't seem as satisfying as beating someone in the same room (and, conversely, being shot by someone in the same room gave you a chance to express disbelief at their skill, or complain about their camping tactics). People who had the same reaction as me would not have been counted as 'gamers' for this study.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Nowadays, there too many jocks passing themselves off as "Gamers"
Huh? Aren't games based on pro sports among the most popular/best-selling video game categories? Would it not stand to reason that the more detailed and realistic these games become, the more interest they will hold for people who play the games in real life?
And come on, let's face it... what does it take, really, to "pass oneself off as a gamer"? Videogames -- and especially casual video games -- have become a multi-billion dollar industry. It's not like it's 1978 and you're meeting in your friend's basement to toss around 20-sided dice; entire Hollywood movie franchises are being built around videogame characters. Face it -- it ain't geekery anymore, it's mainstream... just like pro sports.
But a nerd trying to pass himself off as a jock... Now, That's Entertainment!
Can I be the first to say:!*(&^$*&^@!(&*)%&*)%&*1!@&
For the love of DEITY$ when will researchers stop doing stupid research!
Am I the only one that hopes you are also the last to say that? You know, for a "News for Nerds" site, there seem to be quite a few people who pop up for stories like this that seem to be against research for the sake of research. You'd think such a thing would be valued on this site. These are people trying to figure out what makes human beings tick, and this research seems to be showing a correlation between the intensity of an unconscious physiological response (hormonal, in this case) to nearly identical behavior (i.e. the game) in differing social situations. That may not be a big deal to you, and in the long run it may turn out to be a very small thing in our understanding, but it still helps to expand our body of knowledge and possibly provide directions to be looking in future research. How can you call such a thing "stupid"?
And here I thought nerds were the type of people who would support the seeking of knowledge and the establishment of data. :-/
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
And psychologists and endocrinologists are responding to that by saying, "If you knew this, then show us the data you have correlating testosterone response to a near identical stimulus in varying social situations."
I wasn't aware that there were people out there studying anthropological endocrinology. Feel free to link to the studies upon which they base their knowledge. Because otherwise, this "common knowledge" had not yet been established as data, and history shows many examples of common knowledge failing in light of actual empirical observation.
Even if this particular study isn't complete or perfect (I haven't read the actual paper, but only the abstract, so I cannot say), it is a start at establishing data and helping us gain an empirical understanding of how we function.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
If every soldier got to personally know their enemy, there would be no war.
The lack of communication, and the alienation and dehumanization of the foe are what justifies violent recourse. If only saddam hussein hadn't denied Bush's friend request on facebook...
I tend to agree, but it makes some sense about the difference in even a scrimmage for an athletic competition against another team (again, even if it is not an official game) and within the squad. The concept is certainly related.
The Swedish king Karl XI has this figured out already in the 17th century when he organised his forces so that people would fight side-by-side with brothers, cousins and people from the same region as you are from. This improved morale and made people less likely to flee the battlefield as you knew you could depend on, and wanted to support loved ones.
See also the Sacred Band of Thebes --
"Plutarch records that the Sacred Band was made up of male couples, the rationale being that lovers could fight more fiercely and cohesively than strangers with no ardent bonds .... The Sacred Band originally was formed of picked men in couples, each lover and beloved selected from the ranks of the existing Theban citizen-army. The pairs consisted of the older heniochoi, or charioteers, and the younger paraibatai, or companions, who were all housed and trained at the city's expense."
And let's not forget that it was the death of his "bosom friend" Patroklus that send the sulking Achilles into a murderous vengeful rage ....
-kgj
"I find your story interesting. The 'sociopathic kids', you mention that they're harder on their friends than in actual competition. Would it then be a fair assumption to say that they're in it to inflict pain on their friends rather than compete? And to complete the thought: would they be less interested in competing against strangers because their opponent is a stranger and thus the infliction of pain is less gratifying?
And what exactly do the parents convey that lead you to your assumption? Anything specific? I'm asking because this intrigues me and I'd like to know more about how you arrived at your conclusions."
The one particular kid I was thinking about would immobilize his opponent and then do something to cause pain to him, but not advance his position. One of his favorites was to lock a kid up and then grind his chin into the other kid's thoracic spine - it hurts a lot. I couldn't really figure out why all the kids complained about him until I watchd very closely. When I saw what was going on, I stopped it and pulled him aside, and asked:
"When wrestling, why do we inflict pain?"
"To hurt the other guy"
"Ok, why would we want to hurt them?"
"To make them freak out and give up."
When I explained that the proper use of pain was to "convince" your opponent to move the way you want him to move, i.e. toward his back, he looked genuinely dumbfounded. Since I know he didn't get his ideas from his coaches, I went to his dad and explained the situation and asked him to try and reinforce with his son that the point of wrestling is not to go out and hurt somebody. His father became immediately defensive, accusing me of telling my own son to go out and beat someone up - it was the tail end of a conversation about self defense with my son when he asked what to do about bullies when all other options fail (The main kid he was talking about was this guy's son!). His general attitude was - "My kid's not doing anything wrong."
The cosmic irony is that the kid was an awful wrestler who got pinned every single match in under 30 seconds. But after my talk with him he started winning - apparently he figured out that he wasn't going to be able to win by focusing on inflicting pain, so he tried a few moves. As a result, he and his father became much more enthusiastic and not only is the son back this year, his Dad has volunteered to coach. Serves me right for trying to help the little bastard.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson