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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.
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.
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.
i jaywalk becuase of Frogger