teens and pre-teens-if, in fact, there is a cause-and effect relationship between game play and hostile actions. It may instead be that the relationship between gaming and aggression is a statistical artifact caused by lingering flaws in study design, Ferguson says. After statistically controlling for several other factors, the meta-analysis reported an effect size of 0.08, which suggests that violent video games account for less than one percent of the variation in aggressive behavior among U.S. They just try to make it sound like they do,” says Christopher Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University in Florida, who has published papers questioning the link between violent video games and aggression.įerguson argues the degree to which video game use increases aggression in Hull’s analysis-what is known in psychology as the estimated “effect size”-is so small as to be essentially meaningless. Yet researchers who have been critical of links between games and violence contend Hull’s meta-analysis does not settle the issue. “It's not the biggest, it’s also not the smallest, but it’s worth paying attention to.” “Media violence is one risk factor for aggression,” he says. Together, Hull’s meta-analysis and the APA report help give clarity to the existing body of research, says Douglas Gentile, a developmental psychologist at Iowa State University who was not involved in conducting the meta-analysis. Their findings mesh with a 2015 literature review conducted by the American Psychological Association, which concluded violent video games worsen aggressive behavior in older children, adolescents and young adults. But it’s “statistically reliable-it’s not by chance and not inconsequential.” “According to traditional ways of looking at these numbers, it’s not a large effect-I would say it’s relatively small,” he says. But the changes in behavior were not big. They also limited their analysis to studies that statistically controlled for several factors that could influence the relationship between gaming and subsequent behavior, such as age and baseline aggressive behavior.Įven with these constraints, their analysis found kids who played violent video games did become more aggressive over time. They only included research that measured the relationship between violent video game use and overt physical aggression. Hull and colleagues pooled data from 24 studies that had been selected to avoid some of the criticisms leveled at earlier work. So he and his colleagues designed the new meta-analysis to address these criticisms head-on and determine if they had merit. “I just kept reading, over and over again, criticisms of the literature and going, ‘that’s just not true,’” he says. Jay Hull, a social psychologist at Dartmouth College and a co-author on the new paper, has never been convinced by the critiques that have disparaged purported ties between gaming and aggression. A small but vocal cadre of researchers have argued much of the work implicating video games has serious flaws in that, among other things, it measures the frequency of aggressive thoughts or language rather than physically aggressive behaviors like hitting or pushing, which have more real-world relevance. Many studies find gaming associated with increases in aggression, but others identify no such link. This new analysis attempted to navigate through the minefield of conflicting research. Whereas the analysis was undertaken to help settle the science on the issue, researchers still disagree on the real-world significance of the findings. The meta-analysis does tie violent video games to a small increase in physical aggression among adolescents and preteens. A new study published on October 1 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tries to resolve the controversy by weighing the findings of two dozen studies on the topic. But many studies have failed to find a clear connection between violent game play and belligerent behavior, and the controversy over whether the shoot-‘em-up world transfers to real life has persisted for years. Intuitively, it makes sense Splatterhouse and Postal 2 would serve as virtual training sessions for teens, encouraging them to act out in ways that mimic game-related violence.
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