An argument Research paper

27

level 2:

teaching us to fear

B ack in 2005, at the height of the Second Gulf War, then-senator Hillary Clinton held a press conference to focus national attention on the scourge that was putting so many

of our nation’s youth at risk: violent video games. Along with sena- tors Joseph Lieberman, Tim Johnson, and Evan Bayh, Clinton was introducing the Family Entertainment Protection Act, a law that would have put the teeth of federal enforcement behind the exist- ing Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) classification of video game content. While the age guidelines associated with these ratings were already enforced by major retailers—who were obvi- ously invested in maintaining their family-friendly images—doing so was technically voluntary. The proposed bill would have changed all that: any retailer who sold an M-rated game (similar to an R-rated movie) to a minor would have faced fines and community service.

“It is almost routine in popular games for players to spray other people with Uzis, to drive over pedestrians, to kill police officers, to attack women, and in some cases even to engage in cannibalism,”26

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said Clinton. Referencing the work of several researchers27 (since discredited28), she continued, “According to the most comprehen- sive statistical analysis yet conducted, violent video games increase aggressive behavior as much as lead exposure decreases children’s IQ scores . . . Everybody knows lead poisoning is bad for children, well I want everybody to know that exposure to violent video games is also bad for children.” Later, Clinton assured listeners that the legislation “is not about government censorship or regulation of content. Quite simply it is about protecting children and empowering parents. We need to treat violent video games the way we treat tobacco, alcohol, and pornography.” Clinton wrapped things up by saying, “If you put it just really simply, these violent video games are stealing the inno- cence of our children.”

Clinton’s bill never made it out of committee and, in 2011, the US Supreme Court ruled that all such legislation was unconstitu- tional and that research evidence could not support claims that it was necessary.29 The court declared that video games are art and that, if they are sometimes violent, this is no different from litera- ture, film, or even fairy tales. But if comparing video games to lead poisoning seems bizarrely overdramatic, Clinton was hardly the only one making such inflammatory statements. Politicians seemed more passionate in their rhetoric about video game violence than they did discussing mental health reform, the war in Iraq, poverty, or any number of issues urgently affecting the lives of young people. Yet, unlike those exposed to lead, millions of children were playing vio- lent video games and growing up just fine. What was going on here?

moral panic!

Your authors are the product of the 1980s, a period that produced the mullet, the Walkman, Cabbage Patch Kids, the Rubik’s Cube, and the Smurfs (see Easter Egg 1). It also produced a number of great

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teaching us to fear 29

moral panics. People panicked over Satanism, Dungeons & Drag- ons, heavy metal lyrics, and microwave ovens slowly giving us can- cer via harmful radiation (indeed, we still talk about “nuking” our food). What exactly is a moral panic? The term refers to a tendency for societies to develop overblown fears of an innocuous scapegoat or “folk devil,” which is then blamed for a real (or often imagined) social problem. Put simply, a moral panic occurs when our fears of an object or activity greatly exceed the actual threat posed to society by that object or activity.

Moral panics can focus on just about anything. These days, they typically involve youth in some way, though they can center on any group—like women or the poor—seen as a threat to the establish- ment. For instance, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the country was gripped by fears that Satanic cults were kidnapping young children and sexually abusing them as part of their rituals. This panic was fueled by the testimony of children detailing outlandish experiences with magic spells, animal sacrifice, and abuse orchestrated by a shad- owy conspiracy of elite occultists. It is now believed that many of the children were influenced in their accounts by panicking parents or therapists and overzealous prosecutors, but not before criminal trials ensued and some reputations were forever tarnished. Perhaps the most famous example is the McMartin Preschool case, in which the proprietors of a day care center were put on trial for the sexual abuse of children in their charge. Many of the allegations were decidedly bizarre and included reports of secret tunnels under the preschool, that some of the abusers could fly, of orgies held at airports, and even that action star Chuck Norris was one of the abusers. Although the day care center’s owners were ultimately acquitted, the trial went on for years, leaving the accused in jail for the entire duration.30

Some moral panics focus on kids themselves, typically over some ostensibly scandalous behavior. Many older adults have a general dis- trust of kids (particularly teens), and every generation seems to think the next has slipped to some new depth of moral depravity shocking

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in comparison to the idyllic memories of their own long-gone child- hood. This fear of youth has been termed juvenoia,31 and some have found that catering to widespread fears of youth culture can be good business indeed. Take the legend of “rainbow sex parties.” An idea popularized in the early 2000s, rainbow sex parties allegedly involved teen orgies in which girls would wear different shades of lipstick and take turns performing oral sex on boys, giving them, in effect, a rainbow of lipstick shades on their penises. This urban leg- end fed into parental fears of teenagers’ hormones run amok (noth- ing new there), and gave television producers and the professionally outraged plenty of fodder. Alas, no evidence ever emerged that rain- bow parties were a real thing.32 We are not saying that teens never do dumb, risky stuff, just that there’s little reason to believe that this is particularly new to any generation, or that there’s a sudden wave of previously unmatched depravity among teens.

Media has also been a rich target for moral panics. Very often when a new form of media or technology is released, society goes through a period of moral panic in which this media or technology is blamed for any number of social ills, whether real or merely per- ceived. These panics can be explained in large part by generation gaps in adopting new technology or media. The young are far more proficient at adapting to innovation than are the old. This can create a perception among older adults that they are losing control of the culture they helped shape—which, of course, they inevitably will—to the very youth they fear and view as morally bankrupt.

Even the Bible has been the source of a moral panic fueled by advancing technology. In Catholic Europe prior to the fifteenth cen- tury, most people were illiterate, and reading the Bible was reserved for the religious class. Books were largely created by hand, making them scarce to begin with, and Bibles were printed mainly in Latin (or Greek in Orthodox countries)—languages only taught to the educated elite. Ordinary folk learned about their religion through the teachings of their priest (though Masses themselves were often

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in Latin, so one imagines there was a fair amount of confusion). This was an intentional hierarchy—the notion of a direct relationship between a person and his or her God was an innovation yet to come in European religion.

In the fifteenth century, the invention of the mechanical printing press changed everything. Books were easier to mass-produce, and finally available to the masses: demand for Bibles in native languages (English, German, French, etc.) exploded. But the authorities, both religious and secular, were concerned that the common folk weren’t equipped to read the Bible themselves. They believed commoners might misinterpret the Bible and get lost on the wrong moral path, ultimately fomenting rebellion, heresy, and the end of society as they knew it (granted, the Protestant Reformation was right around the corner, so these weren’t entirely irrational fears). They introduced severe penalties for producing non-Latin Bibles, and men like Wil- liam Tyndale who flouted them were charged with heresy and exe- cuted. It was a prototypical example of moral panic sparked by fear that new media will result in a loss of control over society.

In the five hundred or so years since then, we’ve seen countless innovations in media, arts, and technology. Almost any you can name has set off some form of moral panic.33 Waltzes, when they were introduced, raised concerns that the close contact between dancers would provoke sexual immorality. In the nineteenth cen- tury, society elders were concerned about women reading novels.34 It was thought that women were unable to distinguish reality from fic- tion (a refrain commonly heard today about youth), and that read- ing romantic novels would send them running off with stable boys en masse, neglecting their duties and leading to the collapse of the family. Immigrant and minority groups were also considered partic- ularly “vulnerable” to the influence of movies and dime novels.35 As the industrial revolution and educational reforms combined to cre- ate the concept of adolescence (before this, you were a child until you were old enough to work, and then you were an adult), young people

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increasingly became the focus of society’s moral concern. Dance halls, short bobbed hair on women, new forms of music—especially those, like jazz and rock and roll, that originated within the African American community—were all sources of moral panic. The dan- gerous phonograph, the salacious radio, immoral moving pictures, and the surely corrupting television set: none escaped censure.

In the 1950s, society turned its eye to comic books. Like pulp novels, only illustrated and popular with children, most comic books of the time focused on horror, science fiction, or crime, and could be quite macabre. One psychiatrist, Fredric Wertham,36 became well known for arguments that comic books caused not only juvenile delinquency but homosexuality. (Batman and Robin were secretly gay, you see. We’re not making this up.) In 1954, Wertham testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, in hear- ings that led the government to threaten to regulate the content of comics (sound familiar?). The result was the Comics Code Authority, an industry self-censorship regime that persisted into the twenty-first century. The code eliminated all nudity, profanity, and any graphic violence from the pages of comic books. Words like “horror” and “terror” were not permitted in comic titles. Law-enforcement offi- cials were never to be shown in a negative light, nor was any sympa- thy toward the bad guys allowed. Good must always triumph over evil, and criminals be punished for their misdeeds. This self-imposed censorship resulted in considerable changes to the comic book industry, with many companies that failed to adopt the code forced out of business. However, as time went on, society became less pan- icked about the dangers of graphic novels—moving on to fret over ever new threats to America’s youth—and the comic book industry eventually abandoned the Comics Code. Today, not only are we no longer worried about the dangers of Batman, but it has recently been discovered that the person largely responsible for the moral panic over comic books, Dr. Wertham, overstated and potentially even fabricated much of his data.37

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During the 1980s, the big concern was rock music, with many older adults convinced that rock bands—ranging from Cyndi Lau- per (seriously, we’re not making this up either!) to AC/DC and Ozzy Osbourne—were promoting suicide, violence, promiscuous sex, and occultism. Many were supposedly including subliminal or backwards lyrics that would entice listeners to all sorts of misdeeds. The name AC/DC (which is an electrical term—hence the band’s signature lightning bolt logo) was said to be thinly veiled code for Satanism, standing not for “Alternating Current/Direct Current” but “Anti-Christ/Devil’s Children.” (Granted, it probably didn’t help that the guitarist appeared with devil’s horns on the cover of one album.) Cyndi Lauper’s song “She Bop,” an extended double entendre for masturbation, was condemned for encouraging sexual immorality. Apparently people were concerned “She Bop” might get teens run- ning around masturbating everywhere (as if they needed Lauper’s help for that).

All this naughty rock music prompted congressional action. In 1985, Tipper Gore, wife of then-senator Al Gore, and Susan Baker, wife of then-treasury secretary James Baker, founded the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), an advocacy group concerned about explicit lyrics in rock music. The group released a list of songs that highlighted their concerns, called the “Filthy Fifteen,” with acts like Twisted Sister, Prince, and Def Leppard joining obvious deviants AC/DC and Cyndi Lauper. Leveraging their connection to Washing- ton insiders, the PMRC then held hearings before Congress, hear- ings that became something of a show trial for ’80s music. Many musicians testified against censorship, including John Denver, Dee Snyder of Twisted Sister, and Frank Zappa. After the usual array of pearl-clutching and scholarly hyperbole, the government threatened action and the industry prevented it by agreeing to slap CDs and albums with the “Explicit Lyrics” sticker we’re all familiar with today.

This sticker is arguably one of the great failures of censorship efforts directed at art. After all, who would argue that there’s less

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profanity or explicit content in music today than in the 1980s? The introduction of the sticker in the 1980s led some companies like Walmart to refuse to sell albums with the sticker, but this put few brakes on the music industry. Some argue that the sticker became a selling point, as telling people that they can’t have something makes it forbidden fruit they only end up wanting more.38 On the other hand, research hasn’t always borne this out, with some studies sug- gesting that youth are more concerned with the perceived quality of the media than its warning labels.39

Around the same time Congress was discussing the dangers of Cyndi Lauper, several musicians, most notably Ozzy Osbourne, were sued by parents who held them responsible for the suicides of their teenaged children. In 1984, nineteen-year-old John McCollum shot himself while listening to an Osbourne album that included the song “Suicide Solution” (which is a song about the dangers of alcoholism, not a pro-suicide anthem). The family sued Osbourne and his record company, arguing that the song caused their son to kill himself. Had the courts agreed, this could have signaled considerable liability con- cerns for artists in all realms who touched upon edgy themes. How- ever, the courts decided against the parents, ruling that music was not the cause of these suicides.40

Moral panic seems to be a constant in a society where nearly everything is always changing, but the moral panics of the past, from rock and roll suicide and Satanism to comic-book-inspired juvenile delinquents, all seem to pale in comparison to what has become the most famous moral panic of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—violent video games.

video game moral panics

As we covered in Level One, people were blaming video games for society’s problems long before Clinton held her press conference in

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2005. As early as 1983, C. Everett Koop, the US Surgeon General, suggested that video games (he was mainly talking about Asteroids, Space Invaders, Centipede, and other popular shoot-’em-up games of the time) were a leading cause of family violence.41 By 1993, Congress was threatening the video game industry with potential regulation or censorship, holding its Night Trap hearings and strong-arming the development of the ESRB ratings system.

However, it was not until the close of the 1990s saw a series of school shootings perpetrated by white suburban kids that “blame the game” really took off. Mass homicides were nothing new to the US, but when they’d happened before, news media put little effort into searching for societal causes and instead blamed the perpetrators. In 1993, Nathan Dunlap, a nineteen-year-old African American, vis- ited the Chuck E. Cheese’s where he’d worked as a cook before being fired. He ate a sandwich and played a video game called Hogan’s Alley. Then he loaded a .25 caliber pistol in the restroom and hid there until the last customers had left for the night. Upon exiting the restroom, Dunlap went on a shooting spree that ended in the death of four employees. In the weeks following, the media and politicians focused on Dunlap’s desire for revenge, his hatred and rage. An article quoted the police chief as saying, “This is just a tragic, tragic example of what can happen if something is not done about the level of violence existing with these kids today,” but nowhere did anyone mention violent movies, television shows, or video games. Vio- lence among minority kids in urban areas didn’t often garner much attention, and when it did, the violence was blamed on the kids and communities themselves. But horrific acts of violence by white kids, supposedly coming from nice families, violated the prejudice that youth violence was a minority/urban phenomenon. Some scholars, such as James Ivory at Virginia Tech, argue that our racial prejudices about violence lead us to seek out external explanations when white kids commit crimes.42 Therefore, if an African American youth, like Dunlap, commits a horrific act of violence, it is because he is full of

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rage or hatred, but when a “nice” white kid shoots up a school, he must have been brainwashed or under the corrupting influence of something outside himself—something like video games.

Perhaps the epitome of this was the 1999 Columbine massacre in Littleton, Colorado. On April 20th of that year, two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, entered their school with the intention of destroying it. Both boys had a history of severe depression and issues with rage and anger.43 For months they planned the attack on their school, hoping to eclipse the Oklahoma City bombing in scope. The two teens had initially intended to bomb the cafeteria and shoot surviving students as they left the school; however, when their bombs failed to explode, they were forced to improvise, and entered the building shooting. Over the course of about an hour, they roamed the halls shooting at terrified students and staff. All in all, twelve innocent students and one heroic teacher were ruthlessly murdered, and twenty-one others injured, before Harris and Klebold committed suicide in the school library.

The Columbine massacre set off a massive quest for answers. Why did two suburban kids commit such a horrific crime? Were they bullied and thus enacting revenge? Were they part of a sup- posedly antisocial goth “trench coat mafia” music culture? Were they reenacting scenes from the movie The Matrix? None of these explanations turned out to fit. Harris and Klebold weren’t partic- ularly goth, nor did it seem that they were bullied any more than most kids, and links with The Matrix appeared to originate from the imaginations of observers rather than the perpetrators themselves. But Harris and Klebold were indeed fans of the violent video game Doom, which involved roaming mazes shooting at zombies and monsters. Primitive by today’s standards, Doom nonetheless looked like the kind of “murder simulator” some anti-game activists had been warning about.44

With little doubt, the Columbine massacre was a pivotal event in cementing in the public’s mind the notion that violent video games

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and school shootings were linked. It also created a cottage industry among scholars: violent video game research. As can be seen in the figure below, the number of research articles on the topic of violent video games begins to dramatically increase in the years after Col- umbine, continuing to soar to the present day.

number of studies ex amining violent video games

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

2009– 2013

2005– 2008

2001– 2004

1997– 2000

1993– 1996

1989– 1992

1985– 1988

Post-Columbine Research EraPre-Columbine Research Era

Scholarly publications on violent video games by year

As is often the case for high-profile mass shooting events, the Columbine massacre led to hearings before Congress, and as would become predictable, these hearings suggested the blame for this horrific act lay with media violence.45 Several scholars argued that media violence had an impact on society on par with the impact of smoking on lung cancer. For instance, prominent anti-game activist and social psychologist Dr. Craig Anderson testified before the US Senate Commerce Committee shortly after the Columbine massacre, saying, “[E]ven though one cannot reasonably claim that a particular act of violence or that a lifetime of violence was caused exclusively by the perpetrator’s exposure to violent entertainment media, one can

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reasonably claim that such exposure was a contributing causal factor. More importantly for this hearing, my research colleagues are cor- rect in claiming that high exposure to media violence is a major con- tributing cause of the high rate of violence in modern US society.”46

How much research was there to support such a sweeping claim? Well, effectively none. So why, even without evidence, were poli- ticians and some scholars so quick to blame violent media for the tragedy of Columbine? Because, in short, that’s what a frightened and emotional public pays them to do. Both of your authors have children. We remember the days after the 2012 Sandy Hook shoot- ing, in which twenty elementary school children were killed. Along with the national trauma of such a horrible act of violence, we recall our fear and sense of powerlessness at the thought of sending our kids to school with the possibility of not getting them back. When people experience such strong emotions, such a sense of powerless- ness, it’s only natural to try to reassert a feeling of influence over an event, even if that feeling is illusory. With these awful crimes, it becomes important for us to identify a culprit, and to look for ways to rid our society of that bogeyman to give us a sense of asserting control. Understandably, this causes us to turn toward authorities and political representatives to do something, anything, to prevent such a tragic event from happening again. For legislators, it helps if this bogeyman is something they can be forcefully against without losing votes. And since older adults control most of the power in our society—they are the ones who read the news, vote, and control the purse strings—their fears are the ones that count.

why we panic

In an ideal world of rationally minded people, the process of testing a belief would be a logical, scientific one. A person might develop a hypothesis, understanding that it’s only a hypothesis and that it

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may be wrong. Then the person would look for data to confirm or refute the hypothesis, being particularly attuned to the latter. Once all the data were in, the person would evaluate it dispassionately to see whether the hypothesis held up and, of course, would remain open to further data.

Were we all robots, we might be able to do this. Instead we are frail, emotional human beings who tend to latch on to cherished beliefs and hold on for dear life, whatever may come! As a substi- tute to testing those beliefs rigorously, we cherry-pick evidence that supports our predetermined beliefs and ignore that which does not. Cherished beliefs lead to pseudoscientific industries (among both scholars and advocates) that produce faux data to fuel those beliefs and stoke the flames of a moral panic.

The diagram above is of a moral panic cyclone (based on theo- ries illuminated by David Gauntlett47) and demonstrates the basic way in which a moral panic begins and becomes self-perpetuating. To understand how it works, let’s start at the top of the wheel, in box number one. Society (or at least the members of society who have most of the influence) comes to a decision, usually based on a

Powerful members of society fear a new technology or trend

Media and politicians uncritically accept fear promoting research

Media and politicians seize on this fear and highlight potential harms

Research is called for which support reasons for this fear

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“gut feeling,” such as: video games are bad. Because these members of society control most of the money and votes, this sets up incen- tives for other elements of society to support those fears (box num- ber two). Politicians call for action against video games. News media covers the supposed harms of video games with breathless concern. Should a young man, who happens to also play video games, do something horrible, news coverage and politicians will focus on the idea that video games likely contributed to this horrible something. This is all meant to serve a segment of the population that doesn’t know much about video games, but doesn’t trust or like this newer digital medium.

The trouble is, this pattern can have an influence on the scientific community. Scientists are, ultimately, human. We love to get grant money. We like seeing our names in newspaper headlines! We like the praise and adulation we get for “protecting children.” Who doesn’t want to protect children! Our professional organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and American Psychological Asso- ciation, enjoy the prestige and influence that come with identifying social problems they and their members can “fix.” To advance their agendas, politicians often call for research, while signaling what they wish the results of that research to be (box number three). For example, after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting by twenty-year-old Adam Lanza, Senator Jay Rockefeller called for “research” by saying, “Recent court decisions demonstrate that some people still do not get it. They believe that violent video games are no more dangerous to young minds than classic literature or Saturday morning cartoons. Parents, pediatricians, and psychologists know better. These court decisions show we need to do more and explore ways Congress can lay additional groundwork on this issue. This report will be a critical resource in this process.”48 The “report” was to be a review by the National Academy of Sciences that examined the scientific literature regarding the influence of violent video games on children. But Sen- ator Rockefeller made clear what he intended the results of the report

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teaching us to fear 41

to be. Under such intense political pressure, the scientific process can’t hope to function effectively or objectively. This kind of political intrusion into science can only do damage, creating pseudo science rather than reliable information.

The finalized politicized research is often oversimplified, exag- gerated, and promoted breathlessly by news media and politicians (box number four). Witness Hillary Clinton’s suggestion that video games have negative effects on our health comparable to those caused by smoking, alcohol, and lead poisoning. Such comparisons should have raised red flags of skepticism, and indeed, they have since been debunked. But at the time, they fit the alarmist narra- tive, and so people repeated them. Most people don’t do much to fact-check information, even extreme claims, that corresponds with what they already want to believe. Bad science gives cover for advo- cacy and political agendas. Extreme claims make for great news- paper headlines and online “clickbait,” and the general public only hears a select view from the research field. Sensationalistic language only further fuels society’s unwarranted fear of this new technology (box one again), thereby creating an even greater moral panic. And round and round we go!

identifying a moral panic

Science does identify real problems and threats to public health: global warming, say, or the dangers of smoking cigarettes. On one hand, how do you differentiate good science from pseudoscientific muck? On the other, how do you distinguish appropriate scientific skepticism from antiscience tin-foil-hatism? These are not easy questions. A lot of really bad science shows up even in peer-reviewed journals, so looking for the publication outlet of a scientific study isn’t quite enough. Below, we offer a few guidelines that may help you identify a moral panic, and distinguish it from a true problem.

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extreme cl aims come before data

One indication that you may have entered the land of moral panic is that pundits and politicians are making shocking claims about some perceived threat to the moral fiber of society. This often takes the form of informing the public that today’s youth are engaged in some immoral or harmful activity we wouldn’t have dreamed of in our day. Look for language such as “Kids today are doing X younger and younger” or “shocking new trend in youth behavior” or “technol- ogy X is having a profound impact on our kids’ behavior.” Particularly when a stunning problem related to youth behavior seems to emerge from nowhere, this is often a sign that a moral panic is gearing up.

With video games, remember, politicians and anti-media activ- ists were complaining about their supposed effects on violence long before there was data to support such claims. Video game research didn’t really get rolling until the late ’80s and, through the ’90s, researchers were pretty honest about acknowledging there wasn’t much evidence to support beliefs that even the most violent games were harmful.49 That only changed after Columbine, when scholars heavily invested in criticizing violent television switched their focus to violent video games. We’ll discuss this in more detail in the next chapter, but, in effect, the focus of scholarship changed to fit the moral panic. Beliefs about the dangers of video games came first, and then dubious social science capitalized on those fears.

Contrast this with other fields, such as research into climate change, or the influence of smoking on lung cancer. In these fields, the data built up first, facing initial skepticism among scientists and the public alike. The slow, steady accumulation of evidence eventu- ally changed public opinion. In a moral panic, public opinion comes first, and specific types of research answers are then demanded. This brings us to our second guideline.

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teaching us to fear 43

public calls for research supporting the moral panic

One of the fundamental problems with moral panics, particularly longer lasting ones, is that they damage the scientific process. This happens when politicians or activists call for “studies” that will help them do something to fix the supposed crisis behind the panic. Watch for language from politicians calling for “research” that will help them understand how to best regulate media. In this case, research not into violence but into how video games contribute to it.

The 2012 Sandy Hook shooting provided rich examples of this. Just days after the tragedy, and with no official word of whether the shooter played violent games at all, Senator Rockefeller made his call for research into violent video games that would help “explore ways Congress can lay additional groundwork on this issue. This report will be a critical resource in this process.” Calling explicitly for research that will move forward a particular agenda or policy goal is a recipe for pseudoscience. These rabid calls for one-sided research epitomized the era from the late ’90s to the 2012 Sandy Hook shoot- ing. The result was a huge pool of junk science that kept repeating the same basic research mistakes (poor measures of aggression, lack of standardization, lack of careful matching of games to ensure they only varied in violent content, and a failure to control for other vari- ables in correlational studies), even after these errors in research had been pointed out again and again.

We’re not the only ones to think so. The Supreme Court of the United States pointed out the very same thing in their decision in the 2011 Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (EMA) case, which considered whether regulation of violent games was consti- tutional.29 Referring to several decades of accumulated research, the Court said, “These studies have been rejected by every court to con- sider them, and with good reason,” going on to discuss how little such studies told us about the real world.

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the goldilocks effect

Another thing to look for is questions along the lines of “Why can’t kids just enjoy the media I enjoyed when I was young?” There’s a great example of this in Fox News’ coverage of Mass Effect. Mass Effect was a 2008 space-action game. Over the course of the thirty-plus-hours of gameplay, players have the opportunity to romance another character, potentially leading to a momentary tasteful sex scene toward the end of the game, in which a computerized woman’s buttocks are briefly visible. The whole thing is about as titillating as what you might see in a PG-13–rated movie, but nonetheless it set off a firestorm, some pundits claiming the scene was the equivalent of hard-core pornogra- phy. A Fox News program featured a panel of “experts” discussing the controversy above the headline “SE’XBOX? New Video Game Shows Full Digital Nudity and Sex” (which, in fact, the game did not). One “expert” claimed Mass Effect would harm children’s future sexual and social development, despite later admitting she hadn’t bothered to play or even look at the game. Watching this panel, it was clear that the panelists were both unfamiliar and uncomfortable with this media. Said one: “This made me feel old watching this. Whatever happened to Atari and pinball and Pac-Man?”50

This attitude is typical of every generation: it’s what we call “the Goldilocks Effect.” Essentially, each generation thinks it got media “just right.” The generation before us was too conservative, they were “stick in the muds” who just “didn’t get” the music and media import- ant to us. But these kids coming along next, well—they’re totally out of control! And so the cycle repeats, generation after generation.

“save the children!” mentality

Saving children is obviously a good thing. We’re not suggesting oth- erwise! But many moral panics adopt a defensive posture in which

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teaching us to fear 45

questioning the panic becomes tantamount to not caring for chil- dren. Granted, many moral panics actually target youth and portray them or their culture negatively, but they usually adopt the language of paternalistic protection while doing so. Those who argue against the panic are accused of either not caring about kids or of being in the pocket of a big, bad media industry.

Sadly, we’ve even seen this type of behavior among academic researchers. Some scholars, invested in promoting anti-media the- ories, have taken to implying that skeptics are the equivalent of “holocaust deniers,”51 that they are “industry apologists,”52 or are motivated by “building careers on contrarianism,”53 rather than by a commitment to scientific truth. This type of language is charac- teristic of any ideological or religious system aggressively defending its beliefs from scrutiny by attacking critics personally. It’s a warn- ing sign that people are defending a belief system emotionally, not objectively subjecting it to reality testing as scientists should.

One of your authors (Ferguson) had an amusing run-in with this. Several months after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting and in the midst of the ensuing (and ultimately misplaced) moral panic, Fer- guson appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation to discuss violent video games. The panel of guests also included a former FBI agent, a con- gressman, an advocate for the mentally ill, and Tim Winter, a rep- resentative of the Parents Television Council—the same anti-media advocacy group that blew a gasket over the brief exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. Everyone on the panel, with the exception of Winter, largely agreed that video games were not a cause of the Sandy Hook shooting. Winter’s argu- ment to the contrary was long on hyperbole but short on data. At the end of the segment, apparently realizing that he couldn’t win on the facts, Winter referred to Ferguson, saying: “Sadly, just as the tobacco industry was able to find researchers to support their notion that their products weren’t harmful, so, too, has the entertainment indus- try.” “I’d like to respond to that!” Ferguson can be heard trying to

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46 moral combat

interject, but he is cut off as the show ends.54 (For the record, neither of the authors of this book have ever received incentives, financial or otherwise, from any media industry.) Failing to provide evidence of harm and then suggesting opponents are lining their pockets at the expense of children’s health is the tactic of those without science on their side.

These are just a few of the red flags that might help identify a moral panic. In general, whenever society, through news media, politicians, and advocate groups, seems wound up about a supposed loom- ing threat to morality—especially one involving media, our sexual behavior, or new naughty trends among youth—it’s time to be suspi- cious. Unfortunately, moral panics can be damaging. As we saw with misplaced fears about Satanic ritual abuse, they can greatly damage the lives of individuals caught up in them. They routinely dispar- age youth and promote anti-youth attitudes among older adults, alienating young people in the process. But most crucially, they can distract us from more pressing issues. As we will learn in the next chapter, some researchers and organizations have used the public’s panic over video games to secure funding to conduct questionable studies seemingly designed to further inflame the public’s fear. For decades, these behaviors have distracted us from issues that actually do influence aggression and violence, such as poverty, mental illness, and educational disparities.

However, the story of the science examining violent video games is at a turning point. The moral panic set off by Doom and Columbine may have hijacked the scientific process, but in recent years a group of rebellious young scholars has begun to topple the well-established empire of anti–video game researchers . . .

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easter egg

1. Ferguson would like it to be known that he detests the Smurfs and did not agree to include a reference to the Smurfs in this sentence. Markey believes that Ferguson is simply a “Grouchy Smurf ” for not recognizing all the Smurfy joy the Smurfs bring to the Smurfy world of Smurfy nostalgia. “La la la-la la la, sing a happy song.”

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