| ceres said: There is a study being done by someone trying to prove that playing violent games does not make you a violent person. Unfortunately he's had a bit of a setback in his research because the study of brain activity while people are playing violent video games has shown that it does cause a lot of activity in the area that applies to agression & violence. Now he has to prove that it's not directly an influence to acting out these agressions. |
Actually, it's people who do think it's a factor have to prove it. You can't prove it won't do it because of causation and correlation. People who are violent more often then not perfer violent videogames. Most people freak out and think that means that video games cause violent behavior... however isn't it more likely that violent people perfer violent videogames because they are infact violent? Otherwise why would that predisposition be there already?
Of course when playing a violent videogame it's going to activate the violence areas of the brain. It's also going to increase your adreneline as well. Because you are doing something violent. Playing sports is also going to cause a lot of activity in the your brain when it comes to agression and violence. Anyone who's taken a biological psychology course should of already known this. The thing is however videogames work as an outlet for violence, assuming parents teach their kids the difference between whats acceptable in a game and reality the kid should be fine.
To me it draws parralels how some people think porn creates sexual offenders even though pretty much all statistical evidence shows that increase in porn in an area actually leads to a decrease in sexual assaults. The reason why areas that are REALLY big in porn have a lot of sexual assaults isn't because of the porn, it's because a higher number of "perverts" live there in the first place.
Without violent video games I would expect violence in this country from kids would increase. Of course whether or not you need the level of gore some games have or if it was just more along the lines of death a game like Call of Duty has is more of an unknown factor.
The only reason you have psychologists supporting theories like this is most psychology students HATE statistics, ignore it and basically limp through it because they want to be clinical psychologists and they took psychology in the first place to avoid math. Now they're clinical psychologists and like people like freud don't need to actually do scientific expierments and can just guess and spout of ideas that are more philosphy then they are psychology. Often times it's to back up that it wasn't their fault, or their parents fault if someone they are counsiling does it. Or even worse it's beause they don't want to admit some people are just born violent and can't be changed by only contained. It really depends on which of the many schools of psychology the person decides to use.
Well that's not the only reason, there's also the ones who are doing it for the money/funding.
