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Study Suggests Violent Video Games May Make Teens Less Violent
barlevg writes "A new paper is out in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence which shows no positive correlation between playing violent video games and acts of aggression. The study of 377 children with attention deficit and depressive symptoms in fact showed a slight negative correlation between video game-playing and aggressive behavior such as bullying, which the researchers posit is due to the games awarding some measure of catharsis. The full paper is available online (PDF)."
The stats in the study show no significant relationship, not a negative relationship. The regression coefficient happens to be negative, but the coefficient isn't significantly related to the dependent variable (bullying). You should change your headline.
Games are a good outlet for stress and frustration. I'd argue a game is a constructive activity as there are things you can learn from video games.
Of course they make people less violent.
Never agreed that violent video games make a person more violent. I've been playing FPS since I was a child with my first being Wolfenstein 3D right when it came out. I also listen to heavy metal. For me it's actually relaxing. Nothing I like more after a stressful day than sitting down and shooting someone in the face.
Who would have thought that giving kids a safe environment to get their aggression out would have beneficial side effects? The said thing is that this study ever had to be conducted in the first place.
I remember when D&D was blamed for suicides, goths were blamed for school shootings, movies were blamed for just about everything and so on. At some point the idiot brigade needs to quit blaming everyone else and go back to being parents instead of outsourcing the job to the media. /rant off
So true. Anyone with a brain has known for years that there is at worst no connection at all between violent games and actual acts of violence.
Its called blowing off steam and it can be accomplished mush better by going outside and playing with other kids. Thats how i did it all i see are kids playing video games or watch cartoons which in my day was saturday mornings. But blowing off mental stress killing zombies is fun its just not enough in my book.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Can we please go more than month without someone posting an article about how there's little to no relationship between gaming and violent behavior?
Seriously - this was news 8 years ago. Nowadays it's just re-blogger-rent-seeking.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
In other news, Jack Thompson's body was found in Florida. Apparently his head had exploded. A copy of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence was found on his desk.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Why is that not as important? This is a non-problem; only a minuscule amount of people, if anyone, die due to some rabid, crazy video game player.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
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I've seen this before when the Enterprise was caught in a time causality loop. The answer is the number 3.
Is 377 sufficient? What is an adequate sample size? How do you determine what the sample size should be?
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
They're doing a bunch of regression analyses and summarising their results using tables. Not a graph in sight. I have to trawl through the text to find R values. Impossible to really evaluate their data. If a student produced this stuff I'd fail them.
soylentnews.org
Remember when the feminists went after porn because it encouraged rape? Rarely has any hypothesis been so dangerously wrong, and so thoroughly disproved. And lest you think we have learned our lesson, I nervously call your attention to the subject of kiddie porn.
Gahh! I hated that episode! It made even less sense than usual, which is really saying something.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The most plausible explanation was that the potential criminals were at home playing.
I think the word you are looking for is training, not playing. ;-)
That article must be suppressed! Just think of all the time and money people have spent trying to force laws on the public because video games are the cause of all evil. Nothing must get in the way of their agenda! Burn! Shred, Chew!
See, you'd think that, but then look at some of the fire arm stats: http://www.factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/
Basicly it shows that firearm sales went up and the number of firearm related murders, assaults and robberies went down.
Then look at the number of deaths in other categories such as drunk driving or just driving in general: http://danieljmitchell.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/causes-of-death-cartoon.jpg
Long story short (too late), people like to focus on the little things and blow them out of proportion while completely ignoring the larger issues or ignoring the fact that the majority of people get along just fine.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
A more plausible one is the "sucking up time" hypothesis. Every hour that kids spend playing games, is one less hour they are out on the street.
There is probably some long term studies and or data regarding this hypothesis from the after school and summer recreation programs that various communities have offered over the years. Its not video game related but that seems to be your point.
After the latest Grand Theft Auto came out (I think it was Vice City) I was passenger in my addicted-to-GTA-roommates car and after a close call I remember him saying "I'm not so sure about this 'video games make you violent' thing, but I know my driving sure has gotten more aggressive since GTA came out'.
Could we correlate unrealistic driving video games with insurance premium increases?
We have politicians that have staked their career on this not being the case, who have spent massive amounts of money (so they could line their own pockets with some of it) on speculation which is much more important than those damned scientific studies and the children, who is going to protect these sweet, innocent children. We are now going to have a whole generation of mass murdering, raping, drug addicted, Mortal Kombat killers running our streets. Don't let REAL data tell you otherwise. It's true, because it makes me millions and don't forget to re-elect Dumbass A next election.
The authors would like to acknowledge the industry of violent video games for funding this research.
Next they'll be suggesting that online porn reduces sexual crime rates. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/30/smut_freakonomics/ And that Child Pornography Reduces Child Abuse, see http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/06/30/child-pornography-reduces-child-abuse/
Somehow I doubt the contributors to "Journal of Youth and Adolescence" are focused experts in human aggression. I similarly wouldn't put much confidence in any paper they published regarding how well children are able to code complex database applications.
The US Military has a large body of research they've conducted over the past 60 years in exactly how to cultivate and control aggression in youths, which is why our soldiers are some of the most lethal on the planet. They also have a similarly large body of research on how to inhibit it -- its instructive how relatively few war crimes have been committed by US Soldiers over the past decade in our many myriad wars.
My layman's summary of their research? Video games are excellent training simulators for violence, but don't actually cause aggression. Aggression is cultivated/controlled through supervised training (or lack thereof). Very similar to Milgram's findings in the 60s.
Dave Grossman's books do a pretty good job of explaining this research in an relatively accessible way.
We don't need video games for that. All you have to do is look to Twitter or ANY online medium where the user feels safe behind their keyboards to find all kinds of hatred, egotism and racism. That has nothing to do with games. If you think it's only white heterosexuals that conduct themselves in that manner, in online games or elsewhere, than you are naive. It's universal.
A more plausible one is the "sucking up time" hypothesis. Every hour that kids spend playing games, is one less hour they are out on the street.
A strange thought ....
I recently stayed at one of those mega-resort complexes in Hawaii. Not my sort of place but I was there for a wedding and the rest of the family was staying there. During checkin I was surprised when they told me about the PS3 in the room and the movie and video game "rental" boxes near the elevators. There was no rental charge, swipe this card and you get a movie/game, you can't get a second one until you return the first. It was fully automated, insert the first disc and now you are authorized to get another one. I was thinking WTF, why would I fly to Hawaii and sit in my hotel room playing video games?
Over 5 days I never noticed an adult using one of these machines, only kids. I now wonder if the resort complex is leveraging this "sucking up time" hypothesis to reduce the mischief the kids can get into. Going to Hawaii may not have been their choice, various interesting activities want you to be an adult so you can sign a liability waiver, plus the activities are expensive, etc. A PS3 in the room and a large library of video games available 24/7 may be a pretty good idea.
Maybe people should stop trying to find correlation between video games and violence... Maybe there is just no relation between those twos...
The first "Depends" is that if parents are supervising, and teaching morals I agree. If nobody is around to teach morals, then I believe that games can have a desensitizing effect on more natural morals.
After reading what I just wrote, I think it important that I point out that the majority of the responsibility of raising the child is with the parents and not a video game maker. The video games play a role, but are not of course the ultimate issue.
The second "depends" is that games are not designed for learning. More often than not, games are designed to induce psychological addiction similar to gambling (not the same mind you, but games can use similar tactics to lure people in). Here is a reference.
While one may conceivably argue that WoW, or Team Fortress are not "violent", in that would not be true.
As with most things dealing with psychology, there is no absolute formula to make a claim that "games are not harmful". At the same time there is no absolute formula to make the claim "games are harmful". While you may not have been impacted, a child in a parent absent environment playing GTA may be impacted.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Your rhetoric is flawed because it only includes gun crimes, not total gun deaths, and the idiotic cartoon associates drunk driving deaths to gun deaths, which is not correct because nearly every drunk driving death is an accident and he doesn't include accidental gun deaths.
To put it in perspective, the US has the highest per-capita gun ownership in the world, and is #11 as far as gun deaths. I certainly wouldn't want to move to any of the countries beating us in that race.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
It's often hard to know when a death is a murder, but it's pretty easy to tell if a death is from a bullet. Lots of murders go unreported and lots of gang deaths get reported as self defense. Just because it's legal to start a fight with someone and kill them once you start to get your ass kicked doesn't mean that the violence rate is any better.
For most of the 20th century, every new form of entertainment/recreation/young people hangout was blamed for the ills of society by the older generation.
I bet the same people blaming violent video games for today's problems probably grew up in an era where their parents and grandparents were rallying against Rock Music and Pinball Parlors and such.
To steal a quote from Wikipedia about my favorite Moral Panic:
In the 1771 German novel Geschichte des Frauleins von Sternheim by Sophie von La Roche, a high-minded character complains about the newly introduced waltz among aristocrats thus: "But when he put his arm around her, pressed her to his breast, cavorted with her in the shameless, indecent whirling-dance of the Germans and engaged in a familiarity that broke all the bounds of good breeding - then my silent misery turned into burning rage."
.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Moralistic mindless campaignaholics will get it that what they are campaigning against won't help what they say they are campaigning for. If people understand their instincitive desires surrounding violence, they are better equipped both to live them out and to control and train them out. People need to be encouraged to do the latter, and given good role models. Avoiding stimulating material only makes people more sensitive to it, and more interested in seeing it, and more likely to live out their 'caveman tendencies' in real life.
Strength and violence were important to man in evolutionary terms, as were feeding and sex. It is no wonder we have deep evolved instincts to seek out and enjoy the four F's in life: that is what we are evolved to seek. In modern day civilisation, we need to temper these instincts consciously, and live disciplined productive lives, and this cannot happen if people insist on hiding material which brings these tendencies to the surface. Sex and violence in media are challenging in how they can affect us, as are sex and violence in daily life. We must develop the discipline to live good productive lives despite these possibilities, rather than trying to hide in a 'civilised' corner where such things are absent.
John_Chalisque
There was a recent case where three SAS trainees tragically lost their lives due to training in hot weather. The banaholics thinking would suggest that training is an evil scourge that causes death and should thus be banned, and that we should stop training our soldiers in cases more training deaths occur. Anybody with half an ounce of sense can see that this would be silly. When it comes to exposure to media and games with strong content, we must take that as part of the challenge in how we develop: learn to resist the age-old 'monkey-see-monkey-do' instinct, rather than doing a 'see-no-evil-hear-no-evil' thing.
John_Chalisque
Dead is dead. Who care about "gun" deaths? The question should be whether or not increased firearms ownership causes more deaths in general.
After having done a fair bit of academic reading on the subject, my overall impression of the research is that gun ownership is not correlated with homicide to a statistically significant degree, positive or negative. Other factors strongly correlate with homicide rate, like income inequality, and entirely explain why the US has crime rates closer to countries like Brazil than to countries like Finland. However, gun ownership does have a significant positive correlation to suicide. I'll leave the policy implications to another time, except to say that it's clear that in our history with gun control policy we have consistently attempted to address the wrong problem.
The question should be whether or not increased firearms ownership causes more deaths in general.
I don't understand how correlating firearm ownership with other types of deaths is significant at all.
I agree that socioeconomic factors are a far, far bigger factor in violent crime in general. I was merely pointing out the flawed logic of using homicide statistics to support the "more guns == less crime" argument.
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