Professor Disputes Reported Link Between Violent Games, Aggression

Texas A&M professor Christopher Ferguson a review entitled The Good, The Bad and the Ugly: A Meta-analytic Review of Positive and Negative Effects of Violent Video Games

The work explores the connection between video game violence and aggressive behavior. Ferguson challenges the findings of other researchers that link violent games to aggression, claiming studies have been influenced by publication bias. An excerpt from his review reads:

Video game violence has become a highly politicized issue for scientists and the general public. There is continuing concern that playing violent video games may increase the risk of aggression in players…

[Ferguson’s] results indicated that publication bias was a problem for studies of both aggressive behavior and visuospatial cognition. Once corrected for publication bias, studies of video game violence provided no support for the hypothesis that violent video game playing is associated with higher aggression. However playing violent video games remained related to higher visuospatial cognition.

At the time that this article is being written the mass-homicide at Virginia Tech… is but a few months old. Not surprisingly… news media have indulged in speculation that video game playing may be involved in the etiology of this shooting although information about the shooter has thus far not supported a substantial link.

Ferguson also points out that although videogame play is commonly seen in today’s school age youth, the incidence of school shootings is extremely rare.

It is not hard to ‘‘link’’ video game playing with violent acts if one wishes to do so, as one video game playing prevalence study indicated that 98.7% of adolescents play video games to some degree with boys playing more hours and more violent games than girls.

However is it possible that a behavior with such a high base rate (i.e. video game playing) is useful in explaining a behavior with a very low base rate (i.e. school shootings)? Put another way, can an almost universal behavior truly predict a rare behavior?

One of the first things you learn about scientific studies set up to test a hypothesis is that the data can be manipulated even unintentionally to prove or disprove a theory according to the outcome desired by the researcher. It’s nice to see someone applying common sense to the issue.

via GamePolitics