August 24, 2007 -
Unless you're already experiencing anger management issues, violent video games will not make you more aggressive.
At least, that's the conclusion of researchers at Villanova University, led by Prof. Patrick Markey. The study, which measured the responses of 167 students who played violent games like Doom 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein as well as non-violent fare such as Tetris Worlds and Project Gotham Racing. Said Prof. Markey:
So probably what's happening is these school shooters aren't doing the shootings because they played the violent video games. They're doing the school shootings because they are angry and maybe they've been provoked in life. Perhaps one of these provocations might be about video games but there's all the other daily provocations that happen. So it's not the video game's fault for these school shootings. It's the person's fault for these school shootings.
The news of the research goes back to mid-April, but this is the first we've seen of this video report.
Comments
I agree, I've never felt more aggressive after just playing a game.... Unless the game caused me some degree of frustration. But that frustration only lasted until I either cleared the area/cause of the frustration or quit playing.
But that cant be, because 1 million + kidds HAVENT gone on shooting sprees or killed people....
I really cant understand how people can spew such bullshit and i REALLY cant understand the people that actually listen...
No study is perfect, but I'd love to read it. I especially want to know if they had their own drfinition of aggression and anger, or if the used pre-defined values in the psychology literature. I'll have to find it later.
-Mike Schwinger
omg...redundancy...
"If you look in the dictionary, under 'redundant' it says 'see redundant'" -Robin Williams
I'm sick of ALL these crap surveys. They are NEVER peer reviewed, making them unscientific, and furthermore the whole (pseudo) science behind it is fundamentally flawed.
100 or even 1000 people can NEVER be a proper sample group. It is simply statistically too small.
There are billions on people on the planet, millions of whom play games. A study of 167 people is only going to show you how those 167 people react in that very narrow experimental situation.
And I'm not even going to get into the issues behind what is "aggression", and what are normal levels in humans are. The whole normalisation of human activity is also a flawed measure.
Ummmm...it is a peer reviewed paper (you could easily check this out). Its published in the Journal of Research in Personality (a highly ranked journal -- I'm a psychology PhD student). Also samples of 100 are extremely common and can be very relevant. Statistically if the effect is large enough an even smaller sample can detect it. If you have access to this paper (or others like it) you can read that the results are statistically significant (i.e., it is extremely unlikely -- even with this small sample -- they happen just due to chance).
for thises tobic