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Long-term Study Finds No Link Between Video Game Violence and Real Violence
SternisheFan sends news that a study has been completed on the long-term effects of violence in movies and video games on violence in real life. A researcher at Stetson University found no link between the consumption of violent media and an increase in societal violence. The study was published in the Journal of Communication. From the article:
"Entertainment Software Ratings Board ratings were used to estimate the violent content of the most popular video games for the years 1996-2011. These estimates of societal video game violence consumption were correlated against federal data on youth violence rates during the same years. Violent video game consumption was strongly correlated with declines in youth violence. However, it was concluded that such a correlation is most likely due to chance and does not indicate video games caused the decline in youth violence. ... Previous studies have focused on laboratory experiments and aggression as a response to movie and videogame violence, but this does not match well with real-life exposure.
What?
So what you're saying is that humans can tell the difference between reality and video games??
Another long-term study found a link between empty wallets and gaming PC upgrades.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Please, old conservative people? We got over D&D being from the devil (mostly) Rock and Roll, Metal, and etc. Can this "debate" please not go on like climate "Debate" has?
During the period of the study, ALL violence was in decline, public perception to the contrary (thanks to our overhyped news cycle that treats news as infotainment).
So, GIGO strikes again.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
and violent acts either. It really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that the rise in violence had a very well explained physical cause
http://www.forbes.com/sites/al...
What kills me, is that more hasn't been done to stop these legal/political shakedowns of particular industries. The formula should be known to everyone by now,
1. Find Deep Pocket
2. Blame problem on their activities
3. Agitate in the media until they make token gestures (Wow all cartons have to have morals) and pay off the people shaking them down.
Violence as a whole is drastically down the last two decades as a whole - so a meaningless correlation if there is one.
This author (http://www.stetson.edu/other/faculty/profiles/christopher-ferguson.php) clearly has experience in clinical psychology. However, he's been talking extensively about videogame violence for a year only; first publications and *very frequent* publications in both peer and non-peer-reviewed (majority) journals. He's stepped quite significantly into the gun+violence debate in the US, too: "Viewpoint: Stop Tearing Ourselves Up About Mass Killings" - http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/... . In short, be sure to read authors with a much longer history on the subject before taking this at face value. But wait -- isn't that the common /. story?
-dC
Thanks really. If video games make you violent, you're the problem. Thanks for stating the obvious.
Another long-term study found that grass is green, sky is blue and water is wet....
portfolio
after playing video games with EXTREME violence. What's the point otherwise, if not to live out your fantasies?
Do you prefer KILLING MACHINE (cool) or Hell Bent for Leather (gay)? Exactly!
Nerds declare it's long been obvious. Details at 11.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I've just skimmed it before I dig into the real content, but I didn't notice any obvious answer to the first question that always comes to mind for these:
Who funded it?
"Study finds no link" is a little different than "Media funded study finds no link". If it was one of those watchdog groups it never would have even been published.
And advertising has no effect on consumer buying habits. Political campaigning has no effect on the vote...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Do violent video games lead to any undesirable behavior whatsoever? Perhaps that question is too open-ended for a single study. Still, how do violent games affect the way people interact with one another, if at all?
From TFA:
For the first study, independent raters evaluated the frequency and graphicness of violence in popular movies from 1920-2005. These were correlated to homicide rates for the same years. Overall, movie violence and homicide rates were not correlated. However, during the mid-20th century, movie violence and homicide rates did appear to correlate slightly, which may have led some to believe a larger trend was at play. That correlation reversed after 1990 so that movie violence became correlated with fewer homicides. Prior to the 1940s, movie violence was similarly related to fewer homicides, not more.
In the second study on video game violence, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) ratings were used to estimate the violent content of the most popular video games for the years 1996-2011. These estimates of societal video game violence consumption were correlated against federal data on youth violence rates during the same years. Violent video game consumption was strongly correlated with declines in youth violence. However, it was concluded that such a correlation is most likely due to chance and does not indicate video games caused the decline in youth violence.
Are you kidding? They don't compare the effects on individual gamers or viewers, they look at crime rates and viewership for society as a whole. These are so far from being controlled scientific experiments it's laughable. Total worthless garbage.
Usually I wouldn't mention this in the interest of good taste, relevance, etc. but WTF is Stenson University?
My strong support of free speech makes me wish that were true. However, I've seen that kids who grow up watching violence and vulgarity tend to be inclined to violence and vulgarity, while people like my wife who grew up on G-rated material tend to act in G-rated ways, and be uncomfortable around that which they haven't been exposed to.
When we were dating, my foul language was a major turnoff to my wife, who had grown up around more polite language and thus didn't cuss herself. I had to clean up my language if I wanted to be with her, which I did. Other kids of friends and family are exposed to, and desensitized to, stuff that makes my wife quite uncomfortable.
Common sense is that what we continuously feed into our minds will of course have an effect. That in no way implies that the GOVERNMENT should adopt any particular policy. It does mean that just as parents are mindful of not letting kids fill their bodies with junk food, we parents should be mindful of how much junk is fed to our kids' minds.
So he is saying that that study used such insignificant populations that significant correlations are likely due to chance? How is any of the results supposed to be worth anything if what the researcher says is true?
I am inclined to believe that they are simply wrong and it is not due to chance. From what I remember, previous studies have found that on a societal level violence goes down.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Sucks.
If it's funded by a special interest group then don't even bother to look at it. Whoever pays the bills gets the result they want. This is true for academia as much as anyone else.
Why is Snark Required?
Television does not affect behavior. Unless its the network selling advertising time.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Violent video game consumption was strongly correlated with declines in youth violence."
This correlates with the number of youths playing violent games in Mom's basement. If they don't leave home, the crime rate drops. Furthermore, being loaded with chips, Twinkies & soda leaves them less able to rise from their desks and commit crimes. Damage to sight & hearing, along with 'trigger twitch' further diminishes their energetic output in crime.
This isn't really a plus for society. Medical care for those gamers who reach adulthood will tax the rest of us heavily. A Kickstarter campaign is proposed for: Think of the Children! It is proposed that by encouraging the kids to masturbate to online porn, they will be cured of their tendency to violence. A parallel campaign will preach: Make Love, not War!
...omphaloskepsis often...
Neither do cartoons. When I was young, two of my favorite cartoons had a whole bunch of people dying (Grendizer and Harlock's french versions), My first FPS was DooM, I played Quake2 and Unreal/UT for countless nights, and still have a thing for a nice deathmatch from time to time.
It doesn't mean I'll go on a rampage and kill people with a chainsaw. People who have problems making the difference between reality and fantasy could also snap by reading a book or any other trigger.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
All male gamers are still rapists though, right?
I blame Chess and Shogi...
I would actually have expected a reverse link -- violent video games having a cathartic effect.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Take that, Jack Thompson!
Other long-term study finds no link between video-game boobs and real boobs.
Who else can see the glaring error in this "scholarly paper" published in The Journal of Communication?
I mean, it would be shocking if it wasn't so common in studies of culture and violence.
You are welcome on my lawn.
the problem is that we don't have any real populist political canidates. What we have is a guild of trial lawyers that create laws to generate lawsuits, and make money in lawsuits instead.
And of course shakedown of industries for token gestures, that include cash bribes to further lobbying efforts.
The problem we have in America isn't that we have socialist politicians, the problem is the socialist politicians have been replaced with jackass "cronyists" who are simply more capitalists, who really don't give a rats ass about corporations further than what they can shake them down for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Ferguson
if more video games correlates with more violence, we know the mechanism, and we have causation. if more video games correlates with less violence, it's just chance. biased much?
Sure you can find studies either way. Most studies show that what we see and hear affects what we do, but sure you can find some that look at a completely spurious correlation and claim otherwise. Check out "Internet Explorer vs murder". It's hilarious, and very similar to this study - comparing trends over time rather than comparing groups who have/do one thing with groups who don't.
Rather than using spurious correlations with literally thousands of other factors in play, a study can do the obvious- compare kids who do watch crap vs kids who don't. Duh. When you compare kids who see a lot of crap vs those who don't, shockingly the kids who see crap tend to do crap.
Have you ever been to a country other than your own? You may have noticed that people in Iran have a different outlook and act differently from people in the Netherlands. That could be genetic, or it could be that what people see and hear as they grow up affects them, that they tend to be similar to what they see. I'm betting on the latter.
My kids have been gaming (mainly FPS , role play and strategy) since they were 5 (now are 26 and 28), they are about the most non violent people I know.
but Anita Sarkeesian swears it does!
Oh, wait, no, that's sexism, not violence. I'm sure it's completely different.
I wonder if there is a difference between (playing FPS) and (playing FPS and having access to a gun IRL) when it comes to IRL violence.
When you compare kids who see a lot of crap vs those who don't, shockingly the kids who see crap tend to do crap.
Where is your rigorous scientific study that isn't based off of subjective soft science, and where is the scientific consensus?
Also, equating real-world experiences to fantasy violence seems rather silly to me.
Brought to you by the same top-tier field of "Studies" masquerading as sciences as tonight's When We Don't Like the Solution, We Deny the Problem.
Really slashdot?
I remember a time when nerds were above all this scientistic crap.
Hang your heads in shame.
Damn, now I cannot blame my violent tendencies on watchin Roadrunner, Tweetie Bird and Bugs Bunny anymore.
Governments wage wars and wars kill a lot of people. They make guns to resolve conflicts. They torture people. They make bombs and chemical munitions. Something should be done about them.
whoosh?
Been to a dozen countries, and I'll agree that outlook and behaviour is different. Amusingly,most had common shows. More amusing, the one with the MOST violent shows at the time (Japan) was the least violent socially. Culture impacts children heavily, and while entertainment is part of culture, it's not the entirety of culture, and being cognizent that entertainment is simply entertainment, diminishes that impact.
Check out the graph of IE market share versus murder rate.
This is precisely the same thing. They picked two things that changed over the last 20 years and reported them as if this would test a cause and effect relationship. If you chart Obama's age vs atmospheric CO2 levels, you'll see that the older Obama gets, the higher CO2 there are. To save the planet, we must kill Obama now before he gets any older, thereby increasing CO2.
Over the last 30 years, speed limits on highways have increased. Also, the speed of the "information superhighway " has increased. Therefore, for faster internet just raise freeway speed limits.
Need to focus on video games and violence for people who are not "normal". http://neuronetlearning.com/blog/video-games-autism-a-source-of-problem-behavior-in-boys/
Also need to not include violent movies. There is a huge difference between passive consumption of movies and the interactiveness of video games.
Without looking at the data, I'm speculating a lot with that suggestion, but I don't think you should dismiss the possibility of inverse causation out of hand.
There's a huge difference between two completely unrelated things being correlated and two different expressions of the same basic psychological urges being correlated. Internet explorer use and CO2 levels are only very distantly related in that both represent signs of a strong economy in a technological society. So odds are good that such a correlation is a fluke, or at best reflects a common cause (more money allowing people to buy more computers and cars).
By contrast, expressing violence in a game and expressing it in real life are similar activities in a lot of ways. If you see a strong reverse correlation there, the odds are reasonably good that you have causation, reverse causation, or a single common cause of both changes. Of course, this assumes a truly strong correlation, as opposed to just a crudely opposite trend, where only the changes in one direction are inversely correlated. And even with a strong correlation, I wouldn't call it solid evidence of inverse causation unless you could find similar inverse correlations at other levels of granularity (e.g. states, cities, and neighborhoods), from other countries, and so on. With that said, the hint that such inverse causation might exist would make it worth further study.
If, on the other hand, you just have a crude trend match (where one is trending upwards and the other is trending downwards, but they don't change directions at about the same time), then yeah, I'd agree that the inverse correlation is probably more like pirates on the high seas protecting against global warming....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Wait, so they're saying the reported violent crime rate was lower as video game usage increased? Ok, maybe it's because people are sitting in front of a screen? Less time to commit a violent crime means less violent crimes... Study seems kind of flawed. "People who play a lot of video games get less work done." Thanks for that brilliant discovery. Maybe a better experiment would be to test aggression levels hours after playing a violent game vs on days when not playing the game. I mean if we really want to know that would be the most direct way.
Another expensive, poorly defined study will be needed to prove no correlation == no causation.
Don't change the hypothesis; the evidence is wrong or suggests something we don't care about.
I've been around a fair long while and I think I remember the first reports probably as long as 25 years ago. Sure games have changed a little since Double Dragon but the reports of it causing little Timmy to beat the living shit out of poor innocent Danny haven't. I guess some things will be considered new to society for a hundred years or more.
I'm wondering how Hatred will be commented by games-cause-violence community ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It is a bit like selling reverse crosses, pentagrams and virgin blood packaged with D&D rulebooks in 80ties would be
I'm generally quite tolerant game-wise, but I must say that Hatred crosses some line for me. But same is true for some movies (Saw, Human Centipede etc), which seems to be 'ok' for mass distribution, so probably something is wrong with me in this case.
Violent games desensitize gamers. It doesn't make them more violent.
They won't go out on an rampage after playing CoD, but will be much more acceptable toward current armed conficts/wars.
Everyone knows that not a single human was killed by another until 1972, when pong saw the rise of video game violence.
Can't wait for this latest attack on games to collapse under its own incompetence.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
(not) influence consumption habbit ...
Rtfa, and what is immediately apparent is the confusion and lack of any concept of controlled testing. From the first 2 sentences of tfa:
"No link found between movie, video game violence and societal violence
An increased violent video game consumption correlates with declines in youth violence"
So, first:
1) there cannot be "no link" and a negative correlation at the same time. The words mean different things.
2) there are many points of subjectivity in the studies, from the movies ratings to the game ratings to the definitions of violence
3) it's a very one dimensional approach, yet drawing a sweeping multi dimensional conclusion. Looking at it only in the context of the mere existence of such games/movies vs total societal violence, but the existence of confounding positive or negative factors - war, economics, population density, television, Hell even weather and abortion - are apparently entirely disregarded
I am 47 and have played "violent" video games since they have ever been. I'm not by any external measure a violent person. I fundamentally don't believe that a nanny state should be involved in any way with evaluating content "allowed" to be consumed by children. Last time I checked, that's what parents were for, and yes, some will get it wrong. I sincerely doubt that playing Call of Duty will make a kid grow up to be a violent criminal.
(Heck, I'm not sure anyone has even established that a propensity for violence even equates with criminality; such a thing is entirely different than low impulse control for example.)
Yet, to suggest that constant exposure to routinized, casual violence has had no impact on my tolerance for, or on my reluctance to resort to violence would seem to fly in the face of the entire multi trillion dollar advertising industry that had flourished over the last 70+ years.
-Styopa
It's called stress relief, and the correlation is very real.
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
This is a classic example of yet another meaningless social sciences paper. What does it actually establish? And what does this mean? What predictions can we reasonably make based on it? Does violence in society really cause violence in videogames? Are people with locus of control issues and aggressive tendencies likely to be attracted to playing violent videogames? What happens if we replicate the study in a culture with low rates of violence?
I want to stress right off the bat that I am not in favor of restricting video game content. That said, any time someone comes along and asserts that games, movies, TV, etc (pick and and all) do not influence behavior, I point to the trillion-dollar industry called "advertising". Its stated, precise intent is to influence behavior.
It's not just the 2nd ammdenment they've set their sights on, it's the second. The premice seems to be...
Life imitates art, therefore violent art must be censored and any artist producing such work must be incarcerated.
I am a gamer and an adult and mostly secular. I am not sure there is no impact. I recently had a 16 year old friend commit suicide. There was a discussion, that perhaps, he suffered; mild post-traumatic stress, because he would spend, daily, hours a day, in battle simulation games on his game console. (I'm using no product names on purpose.) Considering, he was the most kind, generous, polite, emotionally stable young person, you could meet, questions remain about his death. I did not read the study, so I don't know if they gathered facts regarding suicide.
You might as well say soda does not cause violent crime because soda sales are up and Crime is down. Both have way too many factors linked to be useful
I think raymorris needs a canary now.
There can be no link between gaming violence and real violence increases, AND a link between gaming violence and a less violence.
Increased violence and decreased violence are two different phenomena.
What they omit is study was commissioned by the US Military, US Intelligence agencies, and ID Games..
Can you say marketing 'spin'?
I think football is more likely to trigger violence than anything else. I'm all in favor of shutting down the NFL and all the other football leagues....and the 'wrestling' stuff as well. I mean the fake stuff, not the real sport.