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sundin13 on 26 March 2015
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ReimTime said:
sundin13 said:
There tend to be a lot of problems with the studies that show a link between video games and violence such as:
-Showing short term effects only
-Using bizarre mechanisms to detect "aggression"
-Highly flawed methodologies
-Large leaps of logic
-Coorelation vs causation
-General effects of competition

While all of these are not the case in every study, more often than not, these studies have fairly blatant holes somewhere.

Overall, more often than not the research is just straight up bad, whether or not it is peer reviewed (peer review is not the end all be all of validity). Additionally, there are often very strong counterpoints to these publications, including those from Dr. Christopher Ferguson who has published numerous papers on the positive effects of video games.


Do you mind giving some examples? Not disagreeing but I would like to gather as much info as possible.


This is a good counterpoint by Dr. Christopher Ferguson responding to a piece by one of the main names that you may see trying to link video games to violence:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/20/opinion/ferguson-video-games

Also, I think a lot of the things that I am saying are fairly self evident.

Lets talk about "aggression" for a bit. Whenever I hear a study say this word, I almost instantly write it off. Why? Well, first of all, the definition of aggression is fairly vague, and it can't really be strictly defined. Second of all, a lot of different things cause aggresion, from sports to physical activity and I believe that the competition is the primary factor in increasing arousal (an interesting piece about how losing causes "aggression" and not violence: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/04/08/at-long-last-video-game-aggression-linked-to-losing-not-violence/ ). Third, there is a monumental difference between someone getting excited/aggressive and someone being in a position where they would commit a real world act of violence.

Fouth, lets look at some of the ways of measuring aggression:

1. From your first article posted in the OP, the measure of violence is something called the State Hostility Scale. This is a survey which uses a one to five scale for statements such as "I feel friendly" and "I feel amiable" and "I feel offended". Seems like pretty weak ground to stand on if you are trying to assert that someone saying "I feel like swearing" is in any way a reasonable way of linking this to real life violence.

2. The third article in the OP uses a similar survey, except this time using statements such as "If someone hits me, I hit back". Once again, a huge separation between any real world actions and answers to survey questions.

3. This article ( http://public.psych.iastate.edu/caa/abstracts/2000-2004/02BApspb.pdf ) uses "story stems" to show that people who play violent video games have increased aggression, meaning that they have the players complete a story.

4. Other studies use things such as facial recognition software (or something similar) to detect subtable changes in the emotion of the players faces.

My point with all of this, is that these are laboratory studies which take some shallow definition of aggression and try to stretch it to imply that this in any way indicates that video games are causally linked to real world violence.