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Another Study Attacks Violent Video Games, Claims To Be "Conclusive"
Killer Orca is one of many to tell us about a new study on the effects of violent video games on kids. The latest meta-study that analyzed research from 130 different reports claims to have "conclusively proven" that violent video games make more aggressive, less caring kids. "The team used meta-analytic procedures — the statistical methods used to analyze and combine results from previous, related literature -- to test the effects of violent video game play on the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings of the individuals, ranging from elementary school-aged children to college undergraduates. [...] Anderson says the new study may be his last meta-analysis on violent video games because of its definitive findings."
As always, whenever this topic comes up, here are my thoughts on it:
http://livingwithanerd.com/violence-in-videogames/
Excerpt:
You have to allow the little monster to come out every now and then and release its frustrations. If you don't, you risk becoming a quivering mass of nervous and dangerous flesh. What better place to do this than in a simulated environment with simulated violence where the only things harmed are your eyes for staring at the screen?
Living With a Nerd
It's just another study by people with an agenda.
I'll shoot anyone in the face who says that I'm violent.
I seem to remember there being plenty of violent criminals before video games were invented.
Yawn. Another academic tries to prove his pet theory. Nothing is "conclusive" in science. You can merely fail to reject the hypothesis.
It's like saying that children who participate in animal cruelty grow up to be serial killers because most serial killers have a history of animal cruelty. They fail to take into account that almost all CHILDREN have been cruel to an animal at one time or another. No, that doesn't support the point we want to make, so let's not mention it...
Just taking the viewpoint that the majority of comments will probably not take.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
You know what else makes people indifferent and uncaring... living in New York city. Nobody can ignore a bum on the street nearly as well. Should we ban living there too?
Nothing other than a double-blind study with random selection of test subjects can truly be considered "conclusive", IMHO. All studies that I've seen thus far are hopelessly thwarted by selection bias.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
This reminds me of the TV version of this anti-violence crusade in the 80s and 90s.
One thing that always stuck out in my mind about that last round was how the talking
heads of that movement would take things out of context and then whine about them. I
knew this because I watched the stuff they were whining about. They would show you a
little 15 or 30 second bit and then criticize it and leave out ANY of the context.
People can abuse information in any way that suits them.
Disraeli probably didn't even say it first.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
FTA:
How did they rule out the possibility that children who are prone to violence might also be prone to playing more violent video games?
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
As a parent, that seems a pretty fair and balanced analysis to me. And yes, I have been known to play GTA myself. As an adult.
... is that it is very challenging to study political hot topics without bias.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
he says a new study he led, analyzing 130 research reports on more than 130,000 subjects worldwide
It (TFA is actually a link to the school that did the study) doesn't take into account that many if not most of the studies he was studying were horribly flawed and designed to give the answer the researcher wanted (in short, not real science). Few studies I've seen on the subject were the least bit reputable.
However, at the end is a bit of hope -- he calls for parents, not governments, to police the children
Free Martian Whores!
An attention seeking/instant gratification/short attention span culture is generating less caring, more violent children because their communication is self-centered, widely dispersed and largely meaningless between their 7000 text messages a month and their garish myspace pages with 10000 friends.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Oddly enough violent crime has been decreasing since 1992, and is now at 1960 levels. Ergo another possible conclusion: Video games decrease overall societal violence level.
Consider that the first generation of videogame kids became old enough to start committing violent acts readily in the early 90s.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
Note to parents: this also puts the lie to "we must keep our kids inside all the time, since it's a scary world out there".
Yes, I'm a parent, and yes, I'm thinking of my children!
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Reading your comment turned me into a violent criminal.
And that's conclusive.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
For people like me who take science very seriously, I find these results disappointing. I imagine that many people here do as well. Let's remember, though, that just because we don't like the results does not make them wrong. I was really hoping that the universe would not end in a boring heat death, but I'm not about to attack cosmologists because the results of their research have dashed my hopes.
We have to examine the data very carefully, trying to look for other explanations for the correlations that were allegedly discovered. If becomes an established conclusion in the field that video games weakly cause violent and antisocial behavior, we might still decide that we don't need to do anything to regulate them beyond "M" labeling. This research result, even if confirmed, doesn't mean that the prudes won and that the state will be prying Crisis from some fat kid's cold dead fingers. We have many choices in how to react to this. But let's not get on our high-horse and yell about how this research must be tainted because we don't like the result. Fundamentalists with no respect for science do that, and we should meet a higher standard.
Violent videogames do not in of themselves cause violence - BUT - works of fiction (or exaggerated works of non-fiction), including videogames, with characters that exhibit extreme behavior, can warp our perceptions of what "normal" behavior is, giving us license to act in ways we'd otherwise consider extreme.
"Yeah, I'm a gangster and I've killed a few people but it's not like I'm Scarface or anything."
"Yeah, I'm not the best manager in the world, and I goof around a lot, but it's not like I'm Michael Scott or anything."
"Yeah, I've been known to give a perp a beatdown after he's cuffed, but it's not like I'm Jack Bauer or anything."
And so on and so on...
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Anyone remember when the far right religious wing started saying that playing D&D turned people into Satanists who then ritually killed people? Same stuff, different decade. Believe it or not, Ann Coulter of all people even called this type of reasoning BS when she said, "Consider the harmless fantasy game, Dungeons and Dragons -- which happens to be played almost exclusively by young males. When murders were committed in the '80s by (1) young men, who were (2) Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts, some people concluded that factor (2), rather than factor (1), led to murderous tendencies."
You're vi? Nice to meet you, vi, I'm emacs.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
FIGHT!
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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I have my concerns that the Slashdot crowd seem to have immediately disregarded this research, particularly that "correlation is not causation" rant. In this case, they *have* been looking for causation. There is, however, already a response from researchers at Texas A&M discussing the flaws of this particular paper (link below), including selection bias and apparent contradictions from other evidence. In short, peer-review is acting just as it should. It is only because Anderson has jammed out a press release to get his 15 minutes that we are even discussing it. Link to A&M paper http://www.tamiu.edu/~cferguson/Much%20Ado.pdf
My wife's PhD thesis was a Meta-Analysis, and I helped her create some new tools for doing the math behind the analysis so I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the topic. The process (greatly simplified) is this. Dig through hundreds of articles published in peer reviewed journals on the topic you are examining, and find as many as you can that test the specific theory you are studying. All the articles included in the meta-analysis must test the same theory. Next you need to reverse engineer the numbers reported in the article. This can be a bit tricky since each article may have reported their result using different statistical tests. Occasionally some articles don't have all the relevant numbers and you have to contact the author. Once you have all that data together the math is relatively straight forward.
Presuming that all the other articles that you feed into the process are based on high quality research, then a Meta-Analysis can give you an insight to the overall strength of the results of the theory being tested. As you might imagine this process can easily be a Garbage In Garbage Out sort of situation. The researcher performing the meta-analysis must have the ability to identify bad studies that overlooked key moderating variables, or were simply done poorly and remove these bad studies from their analysis. If you want to attack this meta-analysis, attack the articles it was based off of. A meta-analysis by itself is not 'conclusive' just because of the method it represents. The analysis itself must be performed on many many well done studies in order to have any credibility of its own.
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