My Random Statistical Data

A Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist named Mike writes into the comments:

I would say you are either among the many uninformed people I know or you are brilliant in feeding the masses random statistical data that leads to no conclusions to no end other than to sell more of your books. There is an overwhelming body of medical research linking violent media to increased aggression in kids and teens.

This is a pretty crucial point, one that bears walking through more slowly. It is true that a number of studies have found a correlation between violent media and aggressive thoughts or feelings. I think that's an entirely reasonable finding. But *no* study has found a correlation between violent media and actual violent or criminal behavior. In fact, the only study that I know of that interviewed perpetrators of actual violent crime found that they tended to watch *less* media than the average person, and have less of an identifying relationship with onscreen characters.

So the only thing that we've been able to prove after years and years of study is a slight increase in aggression after spending time with violent media. And that's precisely why I brought up the high school football analogy and the "compared to what?" question. Because there have been no studies that I know of that have compared the levels of aggression provoked by violent media to the aggression provoked by any number of activities that we happily encourage as a society: football, pickup basketball games, playing cops and robbers, etc. In other words, the idea that some form of media might create an uptick in aggression is not in itself cause for panic, if we already accept and celebrate many forms of recreation that may have the exact same effect.

And I fail to see why violent crime statistics are "random" in this discussion. The specific accusation leveled by Senator Clinton and other game-bashers is that Grand Theft Auto and its ilk are damaging a whole generation of kids, desensitizing them to violence and thus making them more prone to it. So if all the evidence suggests that this generation is the *least* violent bunch of kids on record, why isn't that relevant to the debate? The argument that the anti-gamers are making is that we have a crisis on our hands with these games, so the first thing we should ask is: where is the evidence of crisis in this generation of gamers, in their real-world behavior? And in fact, there's no evidence of crisis whatsoever -- other than the obesity issue that I referred to. For some odd reason, people like to think that the "kids today" are in some kind of terrible peril, but the happy truth of the matter is that they're doing better today than they have in the past 30-35 years. Despite the fact that they're playing more videogames than ever.

Comments

[Steven Johnson]

Alex, don't get me wrong: I have no problem with studying the effects of all kinds of media, particularly games -- I just object to studies that focus exclusively on the potential negative aspects, with no emphasis on the potential positives. And of course, I object to the "moral panic" mentality about the gaming generation generally.

But look closely at the language in the press release you linked to: the best they can say about the correlation vs. causation question is that it is "more plausible" that violent media is creating aggressive people, and not that aggressive people are more drawn to violent media. My suspicion is that it's a bit of both, but there's no evidence conclusively either way.

But yes, by all means, we should study all these issues... But we should study them in the context of other activities that kids do, so we can put whatever findings we have in perspective.

[mike]

Steven,
Thank you for your response. I'm glad to see you are open to this discussion.

I will track down a couple key research studies (current)that you may be interested in.

Mike

[Steven Johnson]

This is from the surgeon general's report on youth violence from a few years ago:

A substantial body of research now indicates that exposure to media violence increases children's physically and verbally aggressive behavior in the short term (within hours to days of exposure). Media violence also increases aggressive attitudes and emotions, which are theoretically linked to aggressive and violent behavior. Findings from a smaller body of longitudinal studies suggest a small but statistically significant impact on aggression over many years. The evidence for long-term effects on violence is inconsistent.

Based on the findings of studies reported here, the average effect sizes of exposure to media violence on various measures of aggression range from small (r = .15) to quite large (r = .64). The evidence that exposure to media violence is a risk factor for violent behavior is more limited, with small average effect sizes of r = .06 in cross-sectional surveys, r = .13 in experimental studies (Paik & Comstock, 1994), and r = .00 to .22 in longitudinal studies (Huesmann et al., submitted; Milavsky et al., 1982). Taken together, findings to date suggest that media violence has a relatively small impact on violence. The effect on aggression is stronger, ranging from small to moderate.

[Mike]

I suppose I should use a different name...so this doesn't become confusing.
Mike S. is the Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist

I've seen that Surgeon General's Report....important statement but not convincing.
I'm tracking down a couple key research articles...to follow

Mike S.

[Mike S.]

Steven:
1. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2000 - showed with correlational and experimental studies that A. "violent video game play was positively related to aggressive behavior and delinquency." "The relation was stronger for those individuals characteristically aggressive and for men."
B. "Laboratory exposure to graphically violent video games increased aggressive thoughts and behavior"
Both studies conclude "violent video game exposure will increase aggressive behavior in both the short term (laboratory aggression)and long term (delinquency)"
Of course - not making a connection to violent crime. I have not seen studies there either.

2. Journal of Adolescence 2004
Studied many areas
* Short term effects of VVGs
* Long term effects of VVGs
* Video Game addiction
* Usage patterns
* Social and family relationships
* Positive aspects (educational video games)
* Parental controls, rating systems, etc...
Overall conclusion: Via Meta-analysis - "the best estimate of the effect size of exposure to VVGs on aggressive behavior is about 0.26. This is larger than the effect of condom use on HIV risk and the effect on calcium intake on bone loss"

Of course...in multiple studies allowing a meta-analysis....many risk factors and variables were controlled for.

I can get these to you online if you wish.

Mike S.

[Mike S.]

Steven:
Also, your statement that violent crime stats have decreased... has no necessary connection to decreased aggression in children. That is a far stretch and only an assumption. I see kids and teens every day that are violent, aggressive, among other problems as you can imagine - but these don't necessarily register as violent crimes. The alarming piece that you are not aware of is that these children are at a much higher risk of committing these crimes in later years. The expontentially increased graphic violence of these video games is fairly new.
(And i do mean graphic...it has really become outrageous...GTAuto, ManHunt?) What do you think the outcome may be in another 10 years? We may never know...if research into these matters is not continued....as Senator Clinton is requesting.

Mike S.

[Rob]

Steven
I haven't read Everything Bad yet as I have a few books queued up to get through before I get to that. I would however like to make a point. The argument being presented above seems to be subscribing to the fallacy of the Blank Slate, or the idea that humans have no innate propensities or qualities that interact with experience to form our behaviour. To suggest that there is a direct relationship between experience (gaming) and behavior is to fall into this trap. It must be more complicated than this.

However I must in fairness suggest that perhaps one of your own arguments fails the same test and the relationship between gaming and problem solving skills is more complex than simple direct causality.

[Alex Halavais]

The conclusion you are drawing, then, is that increased aggression and acceptance of violence is not at all correlated with increased commission of crime, which I find quite difficult to accept.

While this isn't directly my area, I also am surprised that no longitudinal studies show a relationship to violent media and criminal convictions. A quick web search pulls this, for example:Results show that men who were high TV-violence viewers as children were significantly more likely to have pushed, grabbed or shoved their spouses, to have responded to an insult by shoving a person, to have been convicted of a crime and to have committed a moving traffic violation. Such men, for example, had been convicted of crimes at over three times the rate of other men.Now, don't get me wrong: I think Clinton's headline grasping attachment to yet another "moral peril" campaign against the media is despicable, but it should be countered with reasonable arguments.

Given that our children are being raised in the world of video games, and that there is evidence that violence in games changes how children view the world and act within it, doesn't it make sense to study the issue more closely?

[Alex Halavais]

Drat, didn't realize HTML was not allowed. Here's the link: http://www.apa.org/releases/media_violence.html

[Moon]

Mike S.,

I hope you're a kid b/c that's the worst analogy I've yet heard. ;) j/k.

Seriously, though, aren't you missing something obvious here? Eric's point is that, when engaging in any kind of psychological analysis, a dialogue with the subject at hand is *absolutely essential* for any kind of meaningful conclusion.

According to your logic (suggested by your diabetes metaphor), we can find cures for paranoid schizophrenia without ever talking to schizophrenics, depression without ever talking to depressives (sorry Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, it's not true), etc. etc. A fairer statement would be for you to have said would be, "Does that mean that you have to *examine people* with diabetes to find treatments for the disease?" To which the answer would be, "Of course!" or, if you are less kind, "Duh!"

Do you see his point now?

(By the way, I don't recommend insulting others--it only weakens your own argument.)

--Moon

[Mike S.]

Moon?

How do you think they carry out research studies in this area? They collect long-term data and perform short-term experiments with "gamers" - children/adolescents/teens/adults.
So there is an intimate dialogue with the subject at hand - likely in every study.
And I do see Eric's point. :)
And...your right....not a good idea to insult, but its gets annoying when others
(Steven Johnson)don't take the time to read pertinent info - but feel they are an expert in the area and can make scientific and reasonable conclusions.

Mike S.

[Steven Johnson]

Whoa, Mike, turn it down a notch. I've read *dozens* of studies about media violence -- many of which go exactly against the grain of what you've linked to thus far. I'm happy to work through this debate with you, but not if you're going to act like I'm just making this stuff up.

[Nick]

When we use the word "aggression" are we only referring to unhealthy or inappropriate agression, or all aggression and aggressive behaviour? Aggression can be appropriate (socially, psychologically, etc) in many contexts and instances, and some people may actually need to be more, rather than less aggressive in order to be mentally or physically healthy.

Also is it better to repress or leave undiscovered aggressive feelings, or to explore them through role-playing as in games and therapy?

Are games making people more aggressive or are they allowing them to express their innate aggressiveness?

Are human beings supposed to have aggressiveness as a positive attribute? Or is it always negative?

[Mike S.]

Excellent points and questions Nick !!
It could take multiple lectures to tackle each one, but briefly:

1st: We are focusing on unhealthy aggression - innappropriate to whatever the social context may be during the scenario.
Ex: During child interviews...a question may be posed - regarding a child's immediate action if for instance a classmate bumped into him. (Not stating whether it was accidental or not)
Some answers: find out why, walk away, tell the teacher, bump him back, hit or shove him, fight him after school, etc... Inappropriate aggression is closely related to solutions to social problems being physical rather than verbal.
Now if a peer threatened another and the latter needs to protect himself from harm by using physical aggression - that may be appropriate to the social context.

2nd question: Many kids I see during "play therapy" do act out aggressive thoughts during play. Which can be a healthy medium rather than during school or church or during family dinner.
Also children learn to understand healthy coping mechanisms out in the real world when they do get angry.
Play Therapy is a huge topic - too little room here to expand.

3rd: Violent video games are showing a correlation or link (not cause in itself)to inappropriate aggression: such as fighting,threatening a teacher,bullying,delinquency,etc...
There are healthy ways to express innate aggression. We all learn these as we grow up.

Actually 2-4 year olds exhibit this type of aggression (temper tantrums are an example) but they learn socially acceptable ways to solve problems as they mature.

thought provoking questions !!!

[Mike S.]

Steven:
I know your not making this stuff up. But.....
now I could be wrong....you are an English Lit major, correct?
Now I know your able to extensively read on this topic, but I'm not sure you know how to assess the sensitivity and validity of a medical research study. Maybe you can...but my guess is no. Its not an easy task. There are hundreds of studies out there that come to one conclusion or another, but to understand which are valid and hold weight is a whole different picture.
And then to relate that to a grand conclusion such as: (Decreased crime rate stats means kids are less violent or aggressive) No reputable medical journal would jump to such a conclusion.
Come on, man......you can't see that?

And....listening to your talk on National Public Radio and reading your message to Clinton, I don't see that you understand and have read both sides of the issue. Your statement that "the Kids are Allright" for instance leads me to believe that you no nothing about childhood and teen mental health or family dysfunction in this country.
Indeed video games can be healthy and maybe they are increasing IQ - but to publicly discount the harmful effects is........I'll stop there.

[Eric]

I don't have any statistical data to present, but in my own experiences I tend to fire up GTA when I'm feeling a little on edge, and desire to "blow stuff up". The tendency, and the inclination, preclude the game-playing experience.

I'm not a violent person. In fact, I often enjoy the creation of chaos more than the violence itself.

What amazes me is the experts never bother to ask gamers how they feel or what they get out of the game-playing experience. And the fact that you have non-gamers preaching to other non-gamers about games just seems skewed. The people most upset about games are those that don't even play them.

So where is the intimate dialogue with the gamers themselves? What we have is a moralistic debate from afar, among people who don't even participate in the medium.

Not many people would appreciate Roger Ebert or Leonard Maltin if they gave reviews without ever watching movies.

[Steven Johnson]

Mike writes:

And then to relate that to a grand conclusion such as: (Decreased crime rate stats means kids are less violent or aggressive) No reputable medical journal would jump to such a conclusion.

Try "Media Violence Research and Youth Violence Data: Why Do They Conflict?" Written by Cheryl K. Olson, Professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media, and published in the journal Academic Psychiatry last year. It talks extensively about dramatic decline in youth violence, and also looks at the many ways the "media causes violence" establishment has dramatically overstated their findings over the past few years.

Look, I assume you know that there's been a major re-thinking of the media violence "public health" issue over the past 4-5 years, including that striking Surgeon General's report. There have been a number of meta-analyses published showing that the causal connection between media exposure and actual aggressive behavior is slim at best. (And of course there continue to be studies suggesting a more pronounced link.)

The main beef that the game defenders have with all these anti-media-violence studies is a lack of context, a lack of sensitivity to real-world situations. Slight measured increases in aggressive feelings in a lab are meaningless unless you compare them to upticks in aggression that happen in other happily accepted forms of youth recreation. (I would LOVE to see any studies you know of that address that issue.) And if you think that youth violence statistics are utterly irrelevant to a discussion about whether video games are causing more youth violence, that just suggests to me that you're either someone who has spent too much time in a lab, or who has an agenda to pursue.

Of course, of course, of course, a dramatic decline in youth violence during a period of explosive growth in violent video games doesn't prove anything definitively. But of course neither do your personal experiences working with kids one-on-one. For those of us who are trying to figure out where to put our priorities in an uncertain world -- as parents, politicians, voters, cultural critics, whatever -- those youth violence stats are a giant flashing neon sign saying: perhaps we should focus our attention elsewhere -- like child poverty, for instance, which is indeed on the upswing.

But let's drop all this meta-debate over credentials, and get back to something you were saying earlier that I found very interesting. You're absolutely right that I had been assuming that severe youth violence (i.e., violence that attracts the attention of law enforcement) would correlate with mild violence (bullying, etc.) I have seen a few studies -- including one cited in Olson -- that points to a small increase in bullying in recent years. But that recent Child Well-Being report was just so overwhelming that I figured the bullying numbers were a blip. So explain to me: why are trends in minor violence unconnected to trends in severe violence?

[Renee]

First of all, let me just say that I am an avid online gamer myself. I play such games as Quake 2, Unreal Tournament 2004, and Doom 3. I find these games to be relaxing and entertaining. I also have 3 children: ages 14, 11, and 8. I know what they play and I know what NOT to let them play. What is the real question here? In the case of the grandmother that bought GTA:SA for her 14 y/o grandson...she has NO RIGHT to sue anyone. The game (at the time she bought it) was rated for Mature audiences 17 years of age and over. She bought the game and she was clearly over 17. The person who sold her the game was not in the wrong. Personally I have seen the "Hot Coffee" content - and I feel strongly that someone who was mature and over 17 years of age could handle this type of content quite well without being emotionally scarred for life. One other important thing to note is that ONLINE gaming is substantially different than single player. Online games can change the way that the game was intended to be played. So, if you can't buy age-appropriate games for your children, nieces, nephews, cousins, neighbors or whatever...that is clearly YOUR issue, not the gaming community as a whole. And, if you want the game to be played the way the developers intended with the content intended, don't give the children internet access. People need to start being responsible for their own actions, not blaming the greater society for all of today's problems when they should be taking the blame for themselves.

[Mike S.]

Eric...I hope your a kid b/c that's the worst argument I've yet heard. Does that mean that you have to have Diabetes to find treatments for the disease? Do you have to have HIV to educate a nation in lowering the risk?
? A moralistic debate among non-gamers? Come on!
Also, the debate isn't about older individuals playing video games....its about the early effects the graphic violence (and the learned behavior some games teach toward being rewarded for violent acts)has on young children and adolescents.
Please do some educational reading for your own sake.
And by the way.....I've played video games since I was a kid and still enjoy them.
Renee has a great point....this is one of the major problems - parent education and responsibility.

Mike S.

[Cole]

I think that both "sides" are right about their arguments, but I think that they are arguing about different things.

The question that has to be asked is what behavior do we care about stopping, increasing, reducing, or otherwise affecting.

If the answer to this is that we care about stopping light, violent aggression, mean thoughts and feelings, and what generally seems to be being described as (in my words) stereotypical masculine play behavior, then Mike S. is probably the more applicable argument.

If we care about actual homicides among the videogame generation that is just now growing up, then Steven's argument seems to be more cogent to this discussion.

Each "side" of this discussion needs to agree on a very specific question to answer and the parameters that the answer should be measured in. If you do that, then maybe we can get the two of you to shake hands, apologize, "play nice," and maybe even collaborate on a lucrative book deal :0).

This is a complicated topic, but the simpler the question and parameters used to study it, the more meaningful all of this work will be for people to make decisions based on it.

[Mike S.]

Steven:
I didn't say that "youth violence statistics are utterly irrelevant to a discussion about whether video games are causing more youth violence"

I also didn't say that trends in minor violence are unconnected to trends in major violence.

What I thought you were assuming was that b/c there is a (reported) decrease in violent crimes in the US (although I'm not sure if that is true)
that this directly relates to a decrease in childhood and teen aggression. All I'm saying is you can't necessarily make that conclusion from violent crime stats....too many other variables to consider. You can't take current stats and reverse extrapolate to such a conclusion.

"Slight measured increases in aggressive feelings in a lab are meaningless unless you compare them to upticks in aggression that happen in other happily accepted forms of youth recreation. (I would LOVE to see any studies you know of that address that issue.)"

The two journal reference that I gave you (and there are MANY more) specifically address that.
So read away...
They showed (increased) aggressive behavior and delinquency at home and school (NOT just in a laboratory) while holding many pertinent variables constant. The research is there! Its not an opinion...(that is if you believe in scientific methods) I can't say ANY study is fullproof....buts its enough proof to warrant an intervention.
And I don't work in a lab...I see real kids and teens with real problems every day....and I do what I have learned throughout the years to protect them - Thats my agenda of pursuit. Whats yours?

And to address Cole:
Good point - the studies that I have mentioned have not yet addressed increased aggression to later violent crimes. I don't think I've seen studies on that - but what I know about child development, mental health, family dynamics, and teenage delinquency I can tell you that the kids that pile up the risk factors (and exposure and participation to graphically violent video games is just one) are more likely to become the ones that commit crimes (But I can't PROVE that)

Also: the aggression mentioned in studies is not necessarily mild: it can consist of fighting, bullying, destruction of property, threatening teachers with weapons, anti-authority attitudes, stealing - some of these are already crimes - not masculine play !

I will check out Olson's book....but let me ask up front - does she compare studies over the past 10-15 years or is she stating her opinion?
Maybe both? I'll have to read it first.
My initial interest came from,
Susan Vallani, MD - Medical Director and Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Univ. She is one of the national experts on this subject.

[Joe]

But its a fact that increased aggression and acceptance of violence is not at all correlated with increased commission of crime. Visit me at the link mentioned.

[Mike S]

Joe,
Not at all correlated? I suppose one needs to think about how a criminal mind forms. I'm sure early acts of aggression and acceptance of violence are quite an important part of it. And its pretty difficult to say something in this arena is a "fact" one way or another. Only increased risks, correlations, even a study or more that resulted in causation - it would be suspect to say it was a "fact"

[free]

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[free]

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