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New Study Fails To Show That Violent Video Games Diminish Prosocial Behavior
trawg writes "A new Australian study on the effect of violent video games on Australia has just been published, failing to find any evidence that playing video games affects prosocial behavior. The study compared groups who played different types of games, including notably violent titles like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, as well as non-violent titles like Portal, comparing their behavioral response through a simple pen-drop experiment. In a follow-up interview, the researcher said his perspective on how violence might affect people has changed since he started the research: 'I've played video games for most of my life and got into this research because I couldn't believe that violent video games could make me do something I didn't want to do, that is, be aggressive. My attitude has changed somewhat. These days I find it totally plausible that violent video games could influence people's behavior, but the real question is whether their influence is harmful, and I'm not yet convinced of that.'"
Violent video games do not make me aggressive, so shut the fuck up or I'll punch you in the face!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I'm off to play some leisure suit larry!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
before video games kids played cowboys and indians. we learned at an early age to kill off the idiots trying to kick us off their land
Oh here, let me help you with those. I'll just leave them in your neck!!
It's no more harmful than advertising and political campaigns/propaganda. Take that as you wish.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Well, where to start? The number of people who behaved socially per group were less than 5 in most cases, which is the absolute minimum to draw any statistically significant conclusions. I am concerned that they managed to publish it in PlosOne, as it should have been rejected due to low statistical power.
And also, they tested for prosocial behaviour, not for increased violence.
So failing to show an increase in prosocial behaviour is misleading to say the least, or propaganda for the gaming industry.
ESRB gave Portal a rating of Teen on account of "Blood, Mild Violence."
Games dont make us violent, lag does
Having recently finished as BA in history I feel it safe to say people are violent creatures. You can read about the Ancient Greek's Gymnasium, Roman Gladiators, Europe Divine Right Trials - who won the duel won the law case b/c God won't let the wrong person win, the range of piting animal v's animal fights, the military as the solution when talks break down and a host of belief around pain removing sin. Let face it the only thing violent video games allow is people who aren't very good not to get scared up physically while learning. Possible less people die too.
Life is like untied shoe laces; it always tripping you up and getting in your way.
If violent games don't impact behaviour, then the military can save millions on all of those desensitizing programs (games) that they use. Of course their research probably differs from this study as they, the military aren't trying to show that violent games don't impact "pro" social behaviour. Wouldn't the proper study have been that violent video games impact anti-social behaviour? But then, maybe I missed the frames in GTA where you have to pick up pens from the ground?
A study which examines a possible correlation between the
empire-building behavior ( and associated violence ) exhibited
by the US military-industrial complex and violence in the culture
of the US at home.
I for one believe that there is a significant positive correlation.
When the leader of a country sees fit to use drones to murder
people without a trial, that merciless cruelty tends to drift into
the public social consciousness. If you don't believe me, try driving
on any major highway these days.
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I haven't been playing as many violent video games lately and have moved to playing causal things like tower defense. Mainly for time constraint reasons, not that I was worried about violence. I have noticed no changes to my behavior since switching from violent games to tower defense types games what so ever. I wasn't violent before when I played FPS and others or become more passive because I stopped. As a matter of fact....
Sorry, can't comment more. I have to go. My co-workers have been trying to get into my office and just broke down the first barricade I built to keep him out. need to go repair it and building a catapult that will launch office supplies at anyone getting near my barricades.
A politically motivated study that did not come up with a positive result.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Humans did unspeakable, terrible things to each other...they had no video games, where did they draw on for inspiration?
How can we isolate thousands of years of savagery and blame it on video games? -As in how can we genuinely study this with meaningful results?
Most studies end up concluding what researchers want them to conclude. If they don't, it just makes them look bad so they don't publish.
Short story; historically we are only becoming more social and more peaceful. I suppose the only differences being that we have more media coverage and are more capable, technologically, of mass destruction.
What is it that we are trying to prove with these studies anyways? -I learned about atrocities in the bible long before I knew about video games.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Why would one expect a study to of violent video games and shows to impact pro-social behaviour? Shouldn't the study be looking at the impact on anti-social behaviour or violent behaviour? I would posit that porn doesn't impact pro-social behaviour, either. On the other hand, it most definitely impacts sexual behaviour.
So, based on the Australian study, people that play GTA are just as likely to pick up a pen that fell to the ground for somebody than somebody who didn't play GTA. What exactly does that prove?
Like anything else, a large majority of people can easily shift from fantasy to reality and maintain a reasonable and healthy social morale. If you take a sample size from a pool of kids who have been bullied and constantly picked-on you're going to find a propensity to act out whether it be video games, TV or learned behavior from their environment.
The constant "Does too!" and "Does Not!" debates from both sides of the gaming==evil_people debate are pointless because both arguments have some truth to them yet aren't directed at fixing the actual underlying problem. All this debate does is perpetuate the rising cost of games, or end up in stupid regulation which falls short of fixing anything.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Next they'll be claiming that viewing porn doesn't harm people either!
The only times that games make me anything close to violent is when I am concentrating on something and I get interrupted for something stupid.
I get that it is a game, but at the same time, I just spent 20 minutes clearing this level, and I don't want to have to go through that all over again just because you want to tell me something that could have waited five whole minutes.
It's actually a situation where even my recreation time is valuable to me. And that could just as easily happen from playing a puzzle game like Portal as it could from playing CoD.
I do notice that I tend to like games more where I can hit "Save" more often. I admit that I hate having a game seem like it is temporarily more important than real life to me.
It seems like passive-aggressive personalities and those that are so unused to human interaction, that they are cowed by any interaction, beyond their comfort zone predominate. Maybe the introduction of some aggressive traits to counterbalance that is in order.
From my review: http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
---
A few key ideas from the book:
The deregulation of children's media during the early 1980s (Reagan administration) led to an alliance of media companies and toy companies and other companies (like food companies); the result of this is an immersion for many children in an interlinked experience of seeing media about violence, purchasing related action figures and toys and video games, and having these items promoted every place they go (whether to buy fast-food or just in other kid's homes). This is a big change from the media environment from the 1960s and 1970s that many of today's parents grew up in.
The authors point out that the behaviors promoted by this alliance tend to be very sex-role stereotypical, as in boys need to be fighters and girls need to be princesses. For many children, the authors suggest they can get locked into a pattern of endless cycling through stereotyped behaviors. While it is true that knights and princesses have long been important parts of many children's play (so this is not intended to dismiss that), what has changed for some children is the tone and extremeness of those experience because of the high degree of continual interrelated media/toy/game/food saturation. Rather than children being able to express themselves building on those knight/princess themes in their own unique ways, because of the integrated marketing, for many children there becomes only one way to be a knight or a princess (as defined by some media and accompanying purchased toys to be used in only very precise and narrow ways). The book focuses mainly on the boy part of this equation. One of the authors has writings on the female stereotyping aspect of media and other issues, described here:
http://www.dianeelevin.com/writing.html
The "dilemma" is about a fundamental conflict parents face when dealing with war play. On the one hand, most parents want children to grow and develop by working through developmental issues (like learning to deal with conflict, learning self-control, and learning respect for themselves and others through play, including play involving conflicts as hands-on-learning). On the other hand, most parents want to convey social values related to their beliefs about violence and war as ways to solve social conflicts. The authors clearly do not say all war play is bad, and they also point out that even a cracker can be turned into a gun with one bite. The authors say there are no easy general answers to this dilemma in all situations, but provide a range of options.
They suggest younger kids have trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality, and when children are getting hurt, they suggest pointing out to the children what is obvious to any adult, that some other child is just pretending to be a "bad guy" and they are not really a "bad guy". (It can also helps to try to break out of the bad guy / good guy mindset entirely, to talk about "bad actions" instead of "bad people".)
There are a variety of things one can say and do for children who have gotten locked into a repetitive cycle of war play. They give examples of questions to ask to try to help children broaden their behavioral options in regard to war play. These range from asking how the weapons are supposed to work, asking what if the weapon did some other thing (like sprayed foam instead of bullets), to asking what the "bad guy" does when he is not fighting.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Only true for games without a pause button. Otherwise, you're simply being a dick.
You silly people are just propagating their formula, it's almost down to link bait now lol.
In this discussion it's best just to use the "ignore it and it will go away" philosophy, there really is nothing to see here.
I think I died 500 times in Portal.
so... This study shows that people with different behaviors like to play different types of games, right?
Maybe, these two should not have been in the same category? Only one of them is anti-social and encourages the player to break laws and norms. In the other the player's "duty" is to defeat his country's enemies... Remember: "Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf."
If the study really treated the two games the same (RTFA? What RTFA?) — based purely on the "violence", the negative effects of one game may have been canceled by the positive effects of the other...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Having recently finished as BA in history I feel it safe to say people are violent creatures....
Yes, but humans are also social creatures. We interact based on the patterns we pick up from our society, and the positive and negative feedback cues that our social interactions give us. If you spend a lot of your time interacting with video games, you learn to interact based on the patterns you learn in video games. That's not the only influence on your behavior; it's not even the main influence on your behavior-- but it is one influence on your behavior.
Unless you spend more than eight hours a day playing violent video games. In that case, it probably is the main influence on your behavior.
And some people do play more than eight hours a day of violent video games.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I imagine that the extreme result of this is someone who acts like one of those annoying NPCs in games that have no real use. In particular, every time someone talks to him, he just stands there and gives them the same sentence.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
This would be akin to saying that watching slapstick comedy encourages violence ~50 years or so ago (did that happen? I wouldn't be surprised). Or saying that reading novels with violence in them will do the same any number of years, decades, or centuries ago. The only way to put this is that this is just fearmongering. Saying video games make people fat and lazy? At least that's somewhat acceptable, by virtue of what a video game is and how they are designed these days to suck up as much time as possible, forcing you to continue playing. Even if it isn't necessarily universally true, it's not that much fo a reach statement. But saying that the subject material of entertainment will cause changes in those being entertained is really silly. I guess the problem is that whenever someone shoots up a school and they find that they (or for the needlessly pedantic, he/she) has been playing Grand Theft Auto 500, they automatically assume that correlation implies causation. Which, obviously, isn't true. For example, these people also all read books, drank water, ate food, breathed air, sat, slept, talked, laughed, and cried. Should we say that these, too, cause people to become violent and insane? FEAR THE DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE! I think the sad part is that my parents have actually said all the things I mentioned in the first paragraph...
instead a coming over to beat you up for such a stupid comment ill goto some game and blow stuff up then with that feeling gone go get laid....
I realize this is a less sexy/exciting comment than all the speculation on substantive merits... But the studies lack statistical power. N=64 in the first 2 experiments and N=32 in the 3rd. Those samples are much too small to have even a reasonable chance of detecting the effects that are common in behavioral science, even effects that are considered very consequential. (The authors offer a weak and IMHO unconvincing defense of their sample sizes in the discussion.) Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially with underpowered studies that use null-hypothesis significance testing.
Violence is Obama murdering thousands of civilians in drone attacks. Violence is Obama promising to shoot down the presidential plane of Bolivia, if it refuses to accept a forced landing so Obama's goons can search for Snowden. Violence is Obama recruiting, training, funding, arming, transporting and protecting thousands of Islamic terrorists to use in his campaign to EXTERMINATE secular Syria.
Violence is, you know, hurt inflicted in the real world so that real living creatures suffer in some way.
What video game is 'violent'? Exactly none of them. No video game is any more 'violent' than the book 'Silence of the Lambs' for instance. Fictional depictions of 'violence' are not violence- not even in any sense a conceptual match. Such an idea is a complete nonsense.
Now Obama opening his war-mongering mouth, and howling that every member and employee of Syria's government must be murdered can most certainly be conceptually linked to actual violence. Obama is not, in this instance, engaging in 'fiction' but actually attempting to craft the circumstances in which millions of Humans will horribly suffer the consequences of violence.
Video games follow the pattern of all fiction. Can a person with a pre-disposition to hurt other Humans use a game to wind up his/her bloodlust? Of course, just as similar violent psychopaths have used the Bible, or 'skimpy' women's clothes, or people with different opinions to raise their level of 'anger' until they felt ready to go out and do harm. The violent psychopath is expert in finding stimuli that drive him/her into a frenzy, and will use their imagination to exploit whatever is available in their current environment.
And on this point, looney bins take a pride is creating environments where their violent psychopathic inmates are denied most problematic forms of stimuli. Does this mean the rest of us should be condemned to live under the same circumstances- to have our wider society run on the principles of a secure mental health hospital? I don't think so.
If we exclude the psychopaths, what about the effect of games on ordinary people? Well, here things are simple too. Games can be subverted to operate as the mainstream media does- pushing for instance Obama's war agenda. Just as the New York Times or NBC constantly tells its audience "wouldn't it be great to carpet bomb Syria", games can be perverted to carry the same messages too, but this does NOT mean games are therefore problematic at a fundamental level.
Yes, EA takes money from the US government to use the Battlefield Games to sell the idea of aggressive wars (defined by the Nuremberg trials as the "greatest Crime against Humanity") to as many young men as possible. But then, so does every mainstream media outlet in the West. This is hardly a problem inherent in computer games, or a problem that links to the fictional depiction of 'violence'. Even with Battlefield 3, the vast majority of players are well aware of the putrid evil that motivates the publishers of the game, and are simply playing to have fun, not to be trained as Obama's next generation of stormtroopers.
Ironically, the games that run foul of censors are NOT those that encourage young people to look forward to WW3, but games that satirise and mock violence, like Saints Row 4. Satire deflates the pomp of wicked purpose. Australia wants its young people to practise thinking about sending those 'towel-heads' to their graves, and so has NEVER objected about games that glorify warfare conducted by the West against peoples with no military means to defend themselves. German officials too love these types of games. But dare to make a wacky game where you are mowing down zombies, or murderous aliens, and the Australian censors HOWL "unacceptable, even with a 18+ rating".
There is no mystery as to why people love open-world games with a strong 'violent' content (which, as I said at the top, is nothing to do with real violence whatsoever). These are vicarious experiences, like waking dreams but so much better. The power
make anyone else think of Pesci in Casino? Warning: violent as hell.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Yes, but humans are also social creatures.
But how social one must be depends on the kind of person they are. Some people are perfectly happy interacting with others mostly over the Internet (if they even do that that often), for instance.
Not everyone is an extrovert, and not everyone who isn't an extrovert is depressed, violent, or whatever other nonsense some people may think.
In that case, it probably is the main influence on your behavior.
It doesn't seem to have much of an effect.
Or for games that have a rhythm to them, since stopping in the middle will cause your timing to be off when you start again.
*Fail* to *diminish* *prosocial* (presumably the opposite of anti-social)... flip the negative, carry the two... and we get what we knew all along.
Look, I understand that scientists have to speak very precisely about their results so as to not overstate them. But surely there was a better way to write this headline.
Now what is the media supposed to blame? Cause you know, it's never shitty parenting!
That's funny, people say that "surely these violent behaviors you watch MUST have a negative effect" yet every study finds no evidence for the claim. And now the corresponding viewing of "good | prosocial" behaviors ALSO shows no effect. Maybe we all are actually able to differentiate between inputs and choose to or not to model them.
..."
Or to put it another way, "I do not think that behavior does what you think it does
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
From TFA:
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
"New Study Fails To Show That Violent Video Games Diminish Prosocial Behavior"
Gee... the study failed?
In related news, New Study Fails To Show That Moon Is Made Of Green Cheese.
Researchers plan to conduct further studies in the hope that sooner or later one of then won't Fail.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
ouch as**ole, I am going to wipe out your neighborhood..
If you make the assertion that humans interact based on recently acquired positive feedback patterns more so than our inherent genetically evolved traits we've had for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years... Then I'm going to call bullshit and demand unequivocal evidence for your unsubstantiated claims. For instance, I can simply invoke Godwin -- The Hitler Youth phenomenon wasn't primarily social; It was a genetic predisposition to believe that which we fear to be true, blame shift, follow herd mentality, and disassociate ourselves from violence and wrong doing. Even chimps exhibit these traits, turning a blind eye to brutality. Are you saying that's their culture, or just completely ignorant of neurobiology?
You're a scientist, I expect better of you than this drivel.
I believe that what the study does fails to properly frame the actual problem. It isn't that people exposed to violence in games or movies seek to harm or have any less desire to do good things, the problem is that the inhibitions they would normally have to stop them from using violence in certain situations gets broken down. People get conditioned to see violence as a normal way to respond.
I once spent time with a European vistor that watched US television a great deal during his stay. (This was before FCC deregulation, and there were typically 9 to 11 minutes of ads/promos an hour instead of the 18 to 22 common now). He said that nothing so violent was ever be broadcast in his country. The show he was watching? Bonanza!
If you make the assertion that humans interact based on recently acquired positive feedback patterns more so than our inherent genetically evolved traits we've had for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years...
Both.
Humans have this thing called culture . It allows us to engage in complicated behaviors that, while they may be based on the pre-programmed genetic templates, can be far more sophisticated and powerful than the instinctive behaviors programmed into our genes.
Yes, even trolls. The ability to say stupid things on the internet is not, in fact, instinctive behavior (monkeys do not type even badly-spelled English sentences on blogs) but is cultural behavior. Culture comprises learned things. Just because we don't learn it in school (well, not explicitly) doesn't mean it's not learned-- it's acquired in our interactions with others.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
More valuable to know if real life violence behavior can help us sell video games. $$$$$!
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Remarkable that so few Aussies took pity on the experimenter. Could it be that they've been had before?