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.

Comments

It's hard to find time to be violent

[JoeyRox]

When you're sitting on the couch in your underwear playing video games 10 hours a day.

Does NOT Mean

[mentil]

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.

Re:Social Science = Junk Science

[hey!]

The fact that the study accepted the null hypothesis argues against this being junk science. The flux in the field, with established concepts like priming being vigorously challenged, is actually good sign.

I'm Skeptical of This Particular Study

[mentil]

This study has a few problems. For one, the participants were all adults; the argument is usually that violent video games have a harmful effect on children whose minds are still developing, and these experiments don't assess that. Furthermore, several studies found that short-term aggression was increased by playing violent video games, but there was a lack of evidence for any long-term effects. This experiment didn't study long-term effects, either.

IMO the theories on how violent video games might mentally harm children approach Intelligent Design levels of pseudoscience, pushed by moral guardians who have a knee-jerk "think of the children!" reaction. I've played lots of violent video games, and the ones that most realistically depict violence are pretty disturbing; they make me less likely to want to employ violence, if anything.

What I'd REALLY like to see is if a VR game where you use motion controllers to punch people makes the players more likely to employ punches in real life afterward (in say some roleplay with a dummy where a punch, kick, or handshake can be employed.) I wonder if muscle memory (pressing a button on a Dualshock is nothing like throwing an actual punch) and feeling that the game isn't real (VR takes this away) are the main things stopping a connection between in-game violence and real-life aggressive tendencies. However, there's a big difference between "I'm curious if" and "I'm certain, therefore it must be made illegal immediately." I also chuckle at the idea that 'ragdoll physics' apparently equals 'realism' now; all those hours playing UT2003 and I never realized how REAL it was.

Re:I'm Skeptical of This Particular Study

[clovis]

I did see a study done back in the 1990's sort of like what you're describing.
They observed some groups of the kids for some time before bringing in games, and the kids were graded on how many times they acted aggressively (toy-stealing, shoving, hitting, etc). Kids are people. Most are decent and some are jerks.

Then some groups got non-violent video games and some got violent video games.
In the places that got non-violent games, the individual kids aggression levels remained much the same before and after.
In the groups that got violent games, what they observed is that the non-aggressive kids remained the same, but the aggressive kids got worse, and some much worse.

This sort of thing has been born out in other studies in various populations and situations.
It looks to me like healthy people aren't affected by exposure to violent shows, porn, criminal caper TV shows or whatever. People who aren't mentally healthy get worse. I suspect those people whose lives get devoted to playing Everquest, CoD, Warcraft or whatever, would get "addicted" to something else, perhaps poker playing, perhaps collecting Hummel figurines, if the games did not exist.

I read many studies on the topic of media-induced behavior changes, and I am very sure that the people who have an agenda know this about the differing reactions of healthy and non-healthy people and design their studies in such a way to take advantage of this phenomenon.

For example, suppose that the people who did the study I described above chose to not differentiate ( not publish those measurements) between the known violent and non-violent kids, but just published the group's number e.g. "before violent games, the group had 5 assaults per hours, and after there were 10 assaults per hour". If you didn't know that only one kid in the group was doing all the assaults, you would get a different conclusion that if you did know that fact.

Re:I'm Skeptical of This Particular Study

[mentil]

That's interesting that it was shown that only the kids with violent tendencies tended to be more violent when exposed to violent video games... but also pretty obvious. I've heard it suggested several times on Slashdot before (although that's different from proof, maybe they read the same study.)
However, politicians will say that there's no way to prevent ONLY the violent kids from accessing these violent materials, and thus they ruin it for everybody and it has to be restricted to adults only. Media that contains violence/aggression is so ubiquitous that even with a ban that somehow wasn't struck down by SCOTUS, again, these kids would essentially have to be kept in quarantine to ensure they don't see/hear it, and the value of doing so is questionable. A more sane idea is to redirect the effort of doing these violent media studies, and figure out a way to treat these violent kids to be, you know, less violent.

My own experience

[raymorris]

Here's my experience.

When some of my friends were frequently talking about their twice-weekly poker game, I heard them several times and starting thinking about if I might like to play poker. I ended up playing poker with them, twice a week.

Later, was flying home from a business trip in Vegas and wanted something to read on the flight. I ended up with three poker books. Later I put them in my reading room (bathroom). I was always reading *something*, and that month I read about poker. While driving or whatever, I'd think about what I read - think about poker. I ended up writing a poker- playing bot, spending quite a bit of time analyzing poker as I created software that played poker.

I doubt I would have spent thousands of hours on poker had I never starting hearing about it from my friends. I wouldn't have written poker software if I had read model airplane books.

Whatever book I get, I spend several hours reading about it, and several more hours thinking about it. Whichever TV series I'm into, that's what's in my head.

As a teenager, I was into heavy metal music. I constantly had heavy metal themes pumped into my head, so a lot of my thoughts were around topics in the lyrics.
Later, I started listening to Christian music. I find that when I hear a song about forgiveness, I tend to think about forgiveness. When I'm thinking about forgiveness, I'm more likely to forgive. I'm also more likely to be grateful for the forgiveness I've received, if that's what I'm thinking about because that's what I'm hearing on my way to work.

From my experience, it seems obvious that whatever I'm exposed to a lot affects what I think about. What I think about a lot tends to affect what I do.

Does that mean that if I hear you say the words "eat cheese" I'm going to immediately run to go eat cheese? Of course not? But if people are constantly offering me different kinds of cheeses, talking about which cheese goes well with what, I just might try some cheese every so often.

If my mind is on violence several hours per day, sure whatever I think about a lot is going to tend effect what I'm more likely to do.

Re:My own experience

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel like the accurate analogy would be you suddenly sitting down and starting to deal a poker table in the middle of a busy street because you're thinking about poker. It's what you think about exactly that counts, not the "area" of thinking you're doing. Even if the area contains violence, thinking doesn't automatically become violence only. Even if the area contains card dealing, thinking doesn't automatically become card dealing only.

In video games, the violence is only the act. The substance comes from what is around the act. Just like with any hobby, really.

Re:My own experience

[Kiuas]

From my experience, it seems obvious that whatever I'm exposed to a lot affects what I think about. What I think about a lot tends to affect what I do.

This is correct obviously, but there are 2 important distinctions that you left out that make a huge impact on the discussion about games/media and violence,

Firstly, as an avid gamer since my teens I've played a lot of violent games, and I find myself often thinking about them when I'm not playing, but those thoughts are not violent in nature. That's because I don't think of shooting a virtual enemy as an act of violence anymore so than I think about capturing a pawn on a chess board as an act of violence. I find myself thinking about stuff like level layouts, how to improve my use of cover, etc stuff that relates to my goal, which is completing the game. I don't play the games because they're violent, I play them because I enjoy puzzles and challenges, and games offer that. Some of them with a violence as a mechanic, some of them without it. I've never had violent thoughts towards real people as a result of playing a lot of games, because my mind is perfectly capable of discerning between actual violence, and a a virtual character on screen being 'shot' at.

Secondly, even if one's thinking about violence, that does not automatically mean one will become more likely to be violent. Here as an example I'll use my brother who in his teens was actually quite aggressive and short tempered as many young males especially are and often got into fights. Then he started kickboxing, which is an extremely violent sport by all metrics. Now, is he thinking more about violence these days than in his teens? Very likely so, he watches matches, practices a lot and teaches techniques etc. But he's not gotten into fights outside the ring since he became an adult because he's now found himself a 'game' in the real world that has given him an avenue to deal with violence in a manner that's more sensible, and also more rewarding as it is a competition. He's learned a lot about respecting other people via the sport. So for him not only thinking but actively engaging in more violence in a controlled setting has actually made him less likely to be a risk for others in the world. He's much more in tune with his emotional responses to situations now, and while he still gets angry and loud easily, he doesn't transition from yelling to actually punching someone but has instead learned to walk away from the situations before they spiral out of control. That self-control is entirely the rest of a combat sport (and good coaches) teaching him discipline.

The primary question with regards to games and media of a violent nature is therefore not 'does the media make people think about violence more?' because even if it does that's not necessarily a bad thing, but 'does the media lessen people's impulse control and/or dehumanize other individuals so that they're more likely to use violence in the real word?'. To me there's no evidence that this is the case. Violent crime has gone down and is going down in pretty much all advanced societies, even though the amount of violent media in different and more graphical forms (think Game of Thrones cutting of limbs and dicks and burning people alive, murdering children etc) has exploded.

Now it's also obvious that people with pre-existing violent tendencies still likely gravitate towards violent entertainment, but as is the case with my brother, I remain unconvinced that that is necessarily a bad thing, because these are precisely the people who in fact need to think about violence and their own relation to it more in order to attain control over their own impulses and behavior towards others, and it's far better for them to do it via something like a game or sport rather than actually getting themselves into violent situations.

Re:Playing video games is disconnecting from reali

[ShanghaiBill]

those who spend huge amounts of time playing video games avoid personal growth and avoid connecting with the world.

Do you have any actual evidence for this? Or are you just spouting off the same "conventional wisdom" that is debunked by this study?

Sure, introverts may be socially isolated and play a lot of video games. But that doesn't imply that the games caused the isolation, nor does it imply that the isolation is actually harmful, to the introverts or to the rest of society.

When I was a kid, there were no video games (other than "Pong"), yet we still had socially isolated people, watching Star Trek on TV, reading SciFi, and playing D&D. So are interactive video games "worse" in some way compared to likely alternative activities? I have seen zero evidence for that.

Re:Not true

[Hal_Porter]

"If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."

* Marcus Brigstocke

Re: Social Science = Junk Science

[Hal_Porter]

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

What about other links?

[houghi]

OK, if there is no link between violent games and violence. How come we are not allowed to see female nipples on tv? Or cursing?
Is that different somehow? And if it is not, how come ads are effective?

People will be influenced by what they pick up. I am sure that violent games will not cause violence, but it might raise the bar a little bit on a much wider scale,

We think rape in prison is funny. Many believe that police violence is just a way to best solve things.

So what it might do is change the norm about violence.

Half truths ...

[johnlcallaway]

I remember the first time I watched Smokey and the Bandit at the movies. When I got in my car, I wanted to speed all over the place.

But I didn't ... because I'm not stupid and know I could crash, kill someone or me, or at least get a ticket.

I'm sure violent video games can make violent people more likely to be violent.

That doesn't mean the other 99% (made up statistic) of society should be kept from playing them.

Re:Playing video games is disconnecting from reali

[beckett]

i jaywalk becuase of Frogger