Two Studies Suggesting a Link Between Violent Video Games, Real-Life Behavior Have Been Retracted (qz.com)

Keith Collins reports via Quartz: In the first three months of 2017, academic journals retracted two papers that suggested a link between violent video games and real-life behavior. The first, entitled "Boom, Headshot!" was published in the Journal of Communication Research in 2012 and, after years of controversy, retracted last January. That study looked at the "effect of video game play and controller type on firing aim and accuracy," and found that playing first-person shooter games can train a player to become a better marksman in real life. Patrick Markey, a psychology professor at Villanova University, found some inconsistencies in the data published in the study. In January 2015, he and a colleague alerted Ohio State University, where the authors of the paper conducted the research. The lead author of the study, psychology professor Brad Bushman, emailed an official at OSU a month later, suggesting the allegations were part of a smear campaign against him and his co-author, according to Retraction Watch. Last January, the Journal of Communication Research retracted the paper. Bushman had agreed to the retraction, and began an attempt to re-do the original study with a larger sample size. A paper published in Gifted Child Quarterly in 2016, authored by Bushman and three others, caught the attention of Joseph Hilgard, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. The paper had studied the "effects of violent media on verbal task performance in gifted and general cohort children," and found that when children watched a violent cartoon for 12 minutes, their verbal skills dropped substantially for a temporary period. What surprised Hilgard most, according to an interview with Retraction Watch, was the sheer size of the effect. Hilgard said that OSU, Bushman, and others he spoke with about the study were helpful and forthcoming, but could not provide information on the study's data collection process. The author who collected the data, it turned out, lived in Turkey and fell out of contact following the recent coup attempt. Last week, Gifted Child Quarterly retracted the paper.

Comments

Re:I still don't 'get' realistic war simulations.

[Dunbal]

I do think videogames are still too one-dimensional in dealing out death.

And why the hell would you just single out video games. Been to the movies in the past century? How about television? Death is part of our culture, rightly or wrongly.

Re:Violence inspires violence

[silentcoder]

Violent media is not, however, "violence". There is a difference between "depiction of violence" and "violence".

There is little doubt that experiencing or witnessing acts of violence can engender future violent behaviour - that this is traumatic, but the claim that the same trauma can be engendered by fictionalized depictions of violence is dubious at best.

Male hero fantasies

[sjbe]

I do think videogames are still too one-dimensional in dealing out death.

Probably true. I find it particularly curious that violence in movies and games is more acceptable than sexuality. Decapitate someone in a movie and you might get a PG-13 rating. Show a breast and you go straight to rated R. Very odd.

Also I really don't get why male teenie fantasies have to evolve around the closest approximation to real war we can produce.

Because males tend to fantasize about being tough and dangerous and are willing to pay to indulge those fantasies. Jerry Seinfeld said it best that all men secretly regard themselves as sort of low level super heroes. This combined with hormones and physiology and societal expectations you get a tendency to glorify violence. Boys learn to play "war" from a very early age and at least in the US we have a gun culture that makes a fetish out of the idea of shooting the "bad guys". Whether you think all this is good or bad I leave up to you.

Re:Male hero fantasies

[Feyshtey]

So on the one hand you are normalizing violence beginning at a young age. It's just something that everyone should expect and accept. On the other hand you're teaching kids that sexuality is shameful , and hide it from them until they are older and need to start figuring it out without any context or guidance.

How is it logical to give a pass to violence with kids by saying it's "outside the normal experience" while also saying it's perfectly acceptable in society to glorify it, and telling kids at the same time that sexuality which is nearly universally something that will be part of their "normal experience" is something that they should feel ashamed of?

People seem to think it makes perfect sense to glorify the thing that we do not want people to engage in, while demonizing the thing we know they will engage in as an entirely natural and healthy part of human existence.

Not realistic at all

[sjbe]

The difference between games and movies is that AAA movies are usually at least somewhat responsible about portraying war as a horrible thing where everyone suffers.

Oh that's just nonsense as a general proposition. Sure some movies do but far more often they out and out glorify the violence. There are plenty of movies where the violence is the main attraction and they don't make any effort to make it seem horrible. Heck most of the Marvel movies make it a good approximation of bloodless.

Re:I still don't 'get' realistic war simulations.

[Nidi62]

Go play Spec Ops: The Line. The entire game is a criticism of glorification of war and the people who play games that do so.

The entire game is literally a Middle East-set Apocalypse Now, which is itself an adaptation of Heart of Darkness. Those stories aren't about war, they're about the depravity and inhumanity that can live inside all of us.