Society essay relate to video game

ISS210 Society and the Individual: Video Games

Topic #3: Video Games and Violence

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Today’s Questions • Do video games cause violent

behavior?

How Do We Know? • Goal is causation • The “but for” question

• But for running the red light, the collision would not have occurred

• Sanders v. Acclaim (2002): “But for actions of video game and movie defendants, the multiple killings would not have occurred…”

• What experiments are not... • What they are: a research design where

the researcher both controls and randomly assigns values of the independent variable to the participants

• Gold standard for establishing causality

Experiments

• Magical part of experimental design; makes experiments gold standard for causality

• Generates two groups: treatment group and control group (treatment can be multilevel)

• When group size is sufficiently large the two groups will be identical…except for whether treatment or control

Random Assignment

• Non-experimental approach: survey people as to how much red meat they eat and measure some health variables

• (One) Problem: Confounder variable of healthy life style generates systematic differences between people who eat low and high amounts of red meat

• Makes it harder to determine what factor gets credit/blame for outcome of interest

Example: Diet and Death

If initial relationship

goes away, after controlling for

confounder, then it was spurious

Example: Diet and Death

• Experimental approach: randomly assign some people to a high red meat diet and others to abstain from it; watch them for 2 years and measure health things

• Randomization solves confounding problem of healthy lifestyle (and all other unknown confounders)

• E.g., some people in meat group will be fitness freaks. Others won’t. Ditto for control group.

Example: Diet and Death

• Can’t always randomly assign things of interest (e.g., gender, education, wealth, etc.)

• External validity/generalizability • Practical limitations/resource

constraints

Limitations to Experiments

• Hundreds of published studies exist

• My approach: 1 “classic” analysis, 2 recent studies, meta studies

Video Games and Violence

• General Affective Aggression Model (GAMM): Psychological and situation variables lead to aggressive behavior

• Short Term: Exposure primes aggressive thoughts or hostile feelings

• Long Term: Repeated exposure desensitizes and results in changes to personality

Anderson and Dill (2000)

• N = 210 introduction to psychology students (probably from University of Missouri)

• Two variables being experimentally manipulated: Irritability (low/high) and video game content (violent/nonviolent)

• Two sessions in laboratory and three sessions of playing the video game

Anderson and Dill (2000)

• Irritability: Not randomly assigned, but pre-measured using a survey instrument

• I can easily fly off the handle with those who don’t listen or understand

• I don’t think I’ am a very tolerant person

• Bottom 25% are low irritability; top 25% are considered to be high irritability

Anderson and Dill (2000)

• Video game violence

• No: Myst • Yes:

Wolfenstein 3d

Anderson and Dill (2000)

• Session 1: Two 15 minute sessions with data gathering at end of each

• Session 2: One 15 minute session with data gathering at end

• Aggressive Behavior: Push a button faster than your opponent; if you lose, then listen to a loud noise

Anderson and Dill (2000)

Anderson and Dill (2000)

• N = 312 psychology students at Northern Illinois University

• Told they were to play a game and then interact with someone else

• Randomly assigned to either Left 4 Dead 2 or Portal; played for 20 minutes

McCarthy et al. (2015)

• Chat room-like interaction with “other” person who said: “How did you liek the game? I bet you sucked lolol”

• Write a response to the partner • Voodoo doll task next for partner (stick

with 0 to 10 pins)

• How much agree with “I would definitely harm my partner” (0-10 scale)

McCarthy et al. (2015)

• Response aggressiveness • Violent game: 2.03 • Non-violent game: 2.06 • No significant difference

• Voodoo doll task • Violent game: 1.22 pins • Non-violent game: 1.16 pins • No significant difference

McCarthy et al. (2015)

• Intent to harm • Violent game: 0.39 • Non-violent game: 0.38 • No significant difference

McCarthy et al. (2015)

• 2 month longitudinal experiment on 90 college students and community resident

• Randomly assigned to play either Grand Theft Auto V or the Sims 3 daily for 2 months (or a passive control group)

• Total game play time average 32-35 hours per person

• Pre/Post test from dozens of possible survey instruments

• No differences…at all

Kühn et al. (2018)

• 2 month longitudinal experiment on 90 college students and community resident

• Randomly assigned to play either Grand Theft Auto V or the Sims 3 daily for 2 months (or a passive control group)

Kühn et al. (2018)

• General idea: One result might be an aberration, but there is wisdom in the crowd

• What you do: Aggregate results from lots and lots of studies to see what there is overall

• You’ll read one (Anderson et al. 2017)

Meta Analysis

• Good: Intuitive • Not Good: Garbage in, garbage out • Publication bias and file drawer

results are still problems (as they are just about everywhere)

Meta Analysis

• Cunningham et al. (2016): What are the medium and long-run influence of video games on crime?

• How does week-to-week crime data correlate with sales of video games (and “intensely violent” games)?

• Video game sales reduces crime • An 8% increase in video game sales would

disrupt ≈ 36 violent crimes/week

Because I Can’t Help Myself!

Summary • Today: Do video games cause

violent behavior?

• Readings • Anderson et al. (2017) • Conditt (2018)

• Next Time: Benefits of video games