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.'"

Comments

In ancient times

[GeekWithAKnife]

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.