The American Psychology Association has released a special issue of its “Review of General Psychology” called “Video Games: Old Fears and New Directions,” which features new research on violent videogames and their impact on children. According to guest editor Christopher J. Ferguson, an expert in violence and videogames and an associate professor at Texas A&M International University’s Department of Behavioral Sciences, there is no conclusive research that violent videogames cause violence in kids.
Makes me feel a little better about my nephew secretly watching me play Dead Space. Don’t know if you should go buy your 5 year old Call of Duty, but it’s nice to know it may not have a drastic effect. No doubt the controversy will continue nonetheless.
Full article here.
Maybe people who like to watch violence have a drawing towards violent games instead. Gladiator games of old, joisting, boxing, MMA, slowing down to look at an accident. It’s part of human nature, and video games are just another release for it.
I know what you are saying but I think the main reason people get so riled up about violent games is the sheer immersiveness of them. The experience is so close to the real thing and we can have such a direct impact on what happens and we can seemingly like in the GTA franchise run people over ingame without real world consequences. I guess its the blurring of the game world and the “reality” that we percieve in our own lives that people are more scared of. You make a very good point that it could be inherrantly violent people are more drawn to these types of games rather then the game causing them to be violent. In my opinion I am not entirely sure what the testing methodology for this was but it strikes me that a massive confounding variable of the whole study is that the participants knew they were getting tested and so may have adjusted their behaviour accordingly and so the results may have been polluted. This is an actual effect known as the Thorndike effect where the psychologist Thorndike went to a factory and tested factory workers for performance and he soon realised that his presence was confounding the entire experiment; factory workers were working harder because they knew they were getting tested! My point is it is not entirely clear how they measured the results of this study and it’s possible what was recorded was not what was actually going on.
Associate Professors of behavioural science know about the thorndike effect (and know ways around it). I’m student in computer science with psychology as minor and even I know.
Its like a chef makes pizza on a grill and you say “you can’t do that, fire burns things and who wants to eat coal?”. A chef knows not to make coal even when using a grill.
I agree with you entirely but I believe that it is a valid point to make and to be aware of. I agree that the Thorndike effect is very well known in psychology circles and is one of the first things a psychology student is taught. One of the main problems about this research is that it appears to be very low in controllability due to the research taking place in the participants environment. I would also argue that violence as a whole is a very subjective notion which is very difficult to measure and define.
I don’t agree that video games are the cause of violence but I do believe that as scientists no matter what the statistics, evidence and findings we should question and criticise the way the research has been conducted since this is one of the fundamental principals of science.
I did a similar degree to you but with psychology as major and computing as minor (kinda).
Video Games are just the latest excuse bad parents use to explain their kid’s bad behavior. Remember when Rap music was the worst thing imaginable? What about TV? Remember the Internet? Don’t forget D&D! This whole storm will blow over soon enough and something new will become vilified as the reason children aren’t “like they used to be.”
But that’s the problem isn’t it ?
Sure gamers may be ‘save’ once the next ‘evil’ thing is discovered, but it won’t change anything if you happen to like the new evil …