No offense to your husband, but Bushman is an idiot. Everyone comes off as an aggressive asshole after being run through one of his “blast tests” and he’s got a particular hard on for video game players. In fact, he’s one of the last morons who still believes that playing games will make someone violent. Jack Thompson, noted anti-video game nut and disbarred lawyer, endorses Bushman’s findings because they’re the only ones he can find anymore that say games make people crazy.
Do you have any issues with the methodology of these studies I linked to? Do you know why he’s getting these results so consistently? Are there contradicting studies? Are there researchers who have changed their beliefs about the mediating effects of violent media on aggressive behavior based on their own findings?
As a gamer myself, I’m interested.
ETA: No offense to my husband taken. He has moved on to studying social and emotional learning and its effect on school climate.
He’s getting the results he’s getting because “blast tests” are almost useless. Everyone knows the blasting is either A) not actually deafening or B) not actually being performed on an actual human being.
Secondly, none of his early tests involved game playing at all. They were all just asked to identify as gamers or non-gamers (with no mention of what games they played). The gamers then supposedly acted more aggressive by blasting their partner with noise more often or with louder noise.
Thirdly, he did the same test with religious texts and the people who considered themselves “most religious” also blasted more aggressively than those who consider themselves less religious. It doesn’t have anything to do with media or video games at all. Some people are just jerks.
Read Grand Theft Childhood by two authors I can’t remember the names of right now. They point out multiple alternate studies that show gaming as such an intrinsic part of everyday life that saying it “causes” violence is a leap you can’t logically make. They also go through the whole history of “social dangers” and point out how all of them eventually became accepted parts of life.
They also talk about why blast tests are useless and Bushman in particular.
Thanks for the resource. Your analysis doesn’t explain why these experiments are showing statistical significance between control and experimental subjects, though. If everyone knows that blasting is bullshit, it doesn’t really explain the outcome of these studies. (Also, his experimental designs do not consist of exclusively blasting.)
Missed the edit window – I think your authors (as well as this guy Jack Thompson) are grossly misrepresenting Bushman’s findings. Jack Thompson in no way represents Bushman’s position, he’s just twisting Bushman’s research toward his own end.
Bushman doesn’t claim video games make people crazy or violent. He conducts experimental studies examining possible factors that contribute to aggressive behavior (aggressive in this context could mean just being an asshole.) While early studies examined aggression levels in gamers vs. non-gamers, his later studies have differentiated between violent video games and neutral or even pro-social video games. He has found that pro-social video games lead to pro-social behavior as well. I’ve BBQed with this guy for goodness’ sake–he’s not a crazy anti-video game nut like Jack Thompson. He’s a social psychologist who is interested, among other things, in mediating effects of violent media on youth behavior.
Furthermore, his studies do not consist of just video games. He has examined many different kinds of violent media, from news to movie clips, and has found the type of media exposure doesn’t really make a difference.
The studies have established a great deal more nuance than this book apparently claims. NOBODY in these studies is claiming that violent media in and of itself causes aggression. There are cognitive and psychosocial factors (violence in the neighborhood, witnessing violence, having genetic vulnerabilities) as well. The group of studies I linked to have taken great pains to isolate and identify these other factors. But across the board the findings have indicated that chronic exposure to violent media is a mediating factor. Not as great a factor as violence in the home or your neighborhood, but a factor nonetheless. For a kid already in a violent environment, violent media could be that psychological push toward aggressive behavior.
The study my husband worked on was a retroactive longitudinal study comparing regular high school kids with kids in juvenile detention facilities. They asked kids to self-report the media they were interested in at age 6 and 7 as well as presently. Then all the data was coded. The findings, when controlling for gender, community/home violence and interview site, still find a correlation between early childhood exposure to violent media and aggressive behavior. The factors with the greatest effect sizes, of course, are still childhood exposure to actual violence and gender. And this study does not claim to show causation.
So this hysteria that you propose Bushman embodies about video game violence just doesn’t exist.
Allow me to quote from one of his articles (Office of Budget and Planning).
85% of all games contain violence? There’s no way that’s possible. That’s counting everytime Mario stomps a goomba as violence. That’s hysteria, plain and simple.
Also, he’s citing an ancient FTC study that was old news by the time this article was written (2007). In the interim, the FTC had found that gamemakers do the best job out of games, movies and TV of keeping age-restricted products in the hands and minds of people of the appropriate age.
So he’s a hysterical nut and a liar. I stand by my case of dismissing anything he has to say out of hand.
Damn but he is an awful writer. I’m guessing the 85% quote does involve stomping goombas, but his studies make a huge distinction between stomping goombas and realistic violence, with the obvious result that the more realistic the violence, the greater the mediating effect. I’m pretty sure he would regard stomping goombas as harmless.
Language choices such as ‘‘nut’’ and ‘‘lunatic’’ and ‘‘moron’’ really aren’t indicative of rational scientific inquiry. That’s your right, of course, but it doesn’t help the credibility of the opposing viewpoint. It seems like every time this issue comes up, there’s a lot of ‘‘no way that could be true’’ and not a lot of actually examining the methodology of the studies and explaining how so many experiments have consistently yielded statistically significant results between control and experimental groups.
The argument against noise blasting doesn’t make sense in the context of the experimental design. Under the exact same conditions, with one dependent variable (exposure to a violent vs. non-violent video game), the kids exposed to the violent game exhibited more aggressive behavior. Period. Even if all the kids in the experiment knew that there was no way the blasting noise would cause deafness, that wouldn’t explain why there was a statistically significant difference in the responses of the kids who played a violent game vs. those who did not.
You see, Justin, in the world of science, it doesn’t matter what Bushman’s ideological underpinnings are and who does or doesn’t agree with him. What matters is how well his studies are designed and whether his results can be replicated.
OK, but in the real world, millions of people of all ages play violent video games, watch violent movies and read violent books. And the national crime rate has plummeted even as social scientists decry the fact that those things are becoming more prevelant in society.
And his methods are suspect because keying someone up and then gaging their response directly after is always going to lead to the “more aggressive” outcome. There are probably thousands of studies showing the aggressive tendecies of everything for games to movies to competetive shopping.
It’s ridiculous.
I do think it’s interesting. Crime rates have certainly gone down significantly, but I’m guessing douchebag syndrome is on the rise.
Anyway, I don’t think Americans are becoming wusses. I think they’re becoming narcissistic entitled jackasses. Generally.
Not that I’ve ever had a wonderful view of human nature in the first place.
It’s all those French fries.
It was bound to happen.
I agree in regard to the narcissists. They are rampant these days. They take any kind of critique or assessment as a personal attack and say that they “deserve” better (grades, evaluations, what have you)—but they don’t earn it.
What if some of your “narcissists” are actually cynics acting out despair at a world they feel has no place for them?
A lot of people - not just young - feel cheated today. They feel that society has so disintegrated that there’s nowhere to turn, no one has their back, and that no one has given them the tools to cope. If we blame people for acting like wimps in those circumstances, that suggests to me we’re the ones not owning up to reality.
(Disclaimer: The above is written by a cynic.)
I haven’t seen that actually…Just an increase in the number of people who turn in piss-poor work, show up late, miss classes, and then get upset with those who are trying to help them by turning every suggestion or offer of assistance into a personal attack. They still insist that they are fantastically bright, don’t need help, deserve to get high grades and transfer, etc., when everything they do (or fail or refuse to do) just proves the opposite. My suspicion is that they were constantly told in K-12 that they could do no wrong and deserved an A for effort.
Then they got to college and found a whole 'nother world.
Then I think you’ve been buying into useful myths about education propagated by social conservatives.
Actually, I’m mentioning what I’ve seen happen over the past 20 years of teaching college students. Being full of themselves does not mean they’re in despair. It does make it difficult for those of us who are trying to help them when they think they need no help or just want a passing grade for showing up now and then.
Reality is a lot more subjective than you think it is.
Please do elaborate, in a way that relates to entitlement/cynicism/wussyship issues.
My best guess as to the meaning of “reality is subjective” is that some people need to be slapped upside the head with someone else’s reality. ???