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Young People Who Play Video Games Have Higher Moral Reasoning Skills (inews.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Young people who play video games, including violent titles, display more developed moral reasoning skills than their non-gaming peers, a study has found. Researchers from Bournemouth University asked 166 adolescents aged between 11 and 18-years old about their video game habits and questions designed to measure their moral development -- the thought process behind determining what is right or wrong. The children and teenagers who said they played more video games from a wide variety of genres had increased moral reasoning scores, including titles containing violent content. Violent games were found to have a positive relationship with moral reasoning while mature content was more likely to produce a negative one, the report published in published in journal Frontiers in Psychology found.
Jack Thompson told me that video games turn kids into real-life killers!!! /s
[sarcasm indicator added due to ADA requirements for the sarcasm impaired]
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I just ran this guy down in my 1969 Mustang. Should I steal his stuff and finish him off, or give him a Med Pack and send him on his way.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Subscription required to actually, you know, read the article. So I didn't bother.
But you can bet I have a very strong opinion on the contents!
of the "domestic disturbances" broadcast on Twitch when the S.O. interrupts the guy's Fortnight game?
So violent video games lead to higher moral reasoning skills, but mature (by this they mean 'M' rated games) games don't. However, you look at their own study data (full study here) in particular Table B1, they show that there's a nearly perfect correlation (.98) between violent and mature. I don't think I've ever seen a correlation that high in any study, but it's besides the point. Since they're that strongly correlated how do they get the result as stated in the summary?
Maybe I just need to read the whole study instead of skimming through it, but the results seem strange to me. I think that this is obviously a study that would benefit from multiple repetitions and with a larger sample size.
Comparing the two populations (gamers vs non-gamers) is only valid if they are similarly distributed with respect to other control variables that might influence moral reasoning. What if age, affluence, level of technological adoption and place of birth have an impact on morality, and are correlated with gaming as well?
He only surveyed 166 people? Really and you come to a conclusion with that few people, come on!
If I'm going to get PK'd for my sneakers or iPhone, it won't be gamers, it will be the non moral reasoning, non-gamers?
I am trying to read https://www.frontiersin.org/ar... but for some reason I am not getting anything but a blank page. Do they define mature content as opposed to violent content ?
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you need to get back on your meds
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And gamers especially like being able to help NPCs for some reason.
I've read some theories that people who can't save money are people who can't picture the future where they will need that money, I wonder if other moral issues are similar where people just can't think out and picture the consequences of their actions. By playing through moral scenarios of any kind, people are kind of forced to think about the situation and can see it somewhat in real life.
Though I'm not sure how this works with games that take away any consequences. Maybe real life experience complements game experience (as in the examples mentioned above with killing the prostitute to avoid paying, real life experience tells us the consequence while the game exercises the mental scenario). IANAP (I am not a psychologist)...
Correlation does not mean causation. It could be the case that more intelligent kids, that also have higher capacity for moral reasoning, are attracted to video games.
He can't, the meds are now too expensive because the patents and copyright last too long, which allowed horrifying mega monopolies on medicine.
I've read some theories that people who can't save money are people who can't picture the future where they will need that money, I wonder if other moral issues are similar where people just can't think out and picture the consequences of their actions. By playing through moral scenarios of any kind, people are kind of forced to think about the situation and can see it somewhat in real life.
I think there's something to that, but I think you missed something more basic here. In order to enjoy video games (or movies) you require a certain minimum level of ability to think abstractly. Some percentage of the population simply can't. People who play video games are going to be able to reason about anything slightly better than the general public, statistically, but it's just correlation without causation.
Games that require any sort of problem solving (as opposed to just action in the moment) will raise the bar some more, and you'd get a larger statistical correlation with ability to reason about anything.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I think the clocks run out on any patents for trepanning though. You hold him down and I'll chisel the hole so that the evil spirits can escape. If that doesn't work we can swing by the bait shop and get some leaches.
It was even worse because was not a "spiritual belief", but some sort of backward science that believed you had to balance the four humors (blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm) to keep someone healthy, so if you had excess of blood, trepanning time.
I've read some theories that people who can't save money are people who can't picture the future where they will need that money, I wonder if other moral issues are similar where people just can't think out and picture the consequences of their actions. By playing through moral scenarios of any kind, people are kind of forced to think about the situation and can see it somewhat in real life.
I think there's something to that, but I think you missed something more basic here. In order to enjoy video games (or movies) you require a certain minimum level of ability to think abstractly. Some percentage of the population simply can't. People who play video games are going to be able to reason about anything slightly better than the general public, statistically, but it's just correlation without causation.
Games that require any sort of problem solving (as opposed to just action in the moment) will raise the bar some more, and you'd get a larger statistical correlation with ability to reason about anything.
Good point, I'm being guilty of correlation without causation in my theory here too. The question of does something cause something else, or are people better at something else also attracted to that first something.
I'll take the convenience of Valve over the PITA that was floppy and CD based games any day of the week.
The study seems to say the kids who play violent video games are better at moral reasoning, but does that lead to more ethical behaviour? A person can be great at moral reasoning and still choose to make the immoral choice. Or are the kids reasoning through and then making better moral choices as a result?
Well the game was never realy ypurs to begin with, you had an (often non transferable) to use it (other limitations probably applied as well), ok as long as the apis the game used remained compatible with yor os the game maker had no way of remotly stopping the game from working, but what game that has single player is at this point in tome depending on the developers server for single player (steam to verify keas maybe) but appart from that ?
Basically, if you don't use a matched control group, you're shooting causality duds. Matching control groups is an art form, so even there you're not out of the weeds.
Children who grow up in homes with fewer books eat more ketchup, both of which correlate with poverty and low scholastic attainment.
* poverty causes ketchup
* ketchup causes poverty
* poverty causes book burning
* book burning causes poverty
* low attainment causes ketchup
* ketchup causes low attainment
* low attainment causes book burning
* book burning causes low attainment
Several of these have been seriously advanced in the academic literature.
[*] There are other ways to dispossess books other than burning books as cheap coal, but taking that into account would have made my list very long.
Obviously, I missed some.
The way I would properly model this is as follows:
num_hypothesis_sets = 3^choose(k,2) for k correlates.
In this model, I've allowed A to cause B to cause C to cause A, but not A to directly cause B and B to directly cause A.
So for each pair (u,v) you get { u causes v, v cause u, no relationship } and each pair can be selected from that set of three items independently.
Trepanning was around long before the four humours theory. Plus the treatment for excess of blood wasn't trepanation, it was bleeding. Obviously.
People with books and a good education in past generations did what? Study? Publish?
Wealthy people with lots of books and a really good education? Support an author?
People with a few books and much less education who had to find work?
The sales of self improvement books?
Now lets try that with computer games?
Well educated with the free time and wealth to enjoy a lot of different computer games as they are published.
Paying full price and having the free time to enjoy the computer games.
Poor but decades later they collect classic computer games that are decades old?
Decades later they have the wealth and free time to enjoy a computer game hobby.
People who are poor and have hours to play computer games every day.
Inner city areas with lots of crime? Stay inside and play computer games?
Is the reasoning from the wealth, books, education? With computer games as a hobby?
The escape from the crime rate of an inner city by playing computer games places that person in a more moral place than many in the same generation?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
What game? You may be ask Ubisoft about that one as they've implemented crazy always-online DRM into a couple of their purely single player products in the past. And they got a lot of flak for that.
You may argue that their games aren't really depending on those connections over the internet, after all they've all been cracked sooner or later, but that is certainly what those software studios are trying to make their games act like.
... is a chicken and egg question. Are mature games more likely to reduce your moral common sense, or are those lacking moral common sense more likely to be drawn to smutty games?
There's evidence that video games can improve cognitive function. For example, a show called Mind Field had an episode where the host tested his maze-solving abilities before and after playing video games for a week. The result was a clear improvement in spatial awareness.
This makes sense because video games are just simulations of some aspect of the real world, and the player is essentially practicing how to behave in those situations.
Anecdotally speaking, Kerbal Space Program taught me how to calculate orbital transfer windows and suicide burn timing, while Factorio taught me how to solve network flow problems. Granted, I don't expect most people to pick up calculus or linear programming from games, but just being engaged with something mentally challenging will produce benefits of some kind.
In terms of studies, though: people who play KSP and Factorio are statistically much better at circuit design, and probably at heart surgery and patent law, than the general public. You can't conclude much from that, obviously.
I do think that gaming of any kind (not limited to computers) that requires problem solving will of course make you better at solving similar problems, just because you've thought through the problem. It would be amazing if someone could leverage that for some real world benefit, but I've never heard of it. "Educational games" have thus far been pretty weak.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
People do not generally agree as to what is "moral" and what is "immoral",
so the idea that there could exist a test that can measure "moral development"
is the kind of social-science bullshit that keeps cropping up here.