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Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

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Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#391

Post by mleonhard »

Ensorceled wrote: post #24
Waterluvian wrote: post #14

Somewhat Tangential: Without any instruction my 2 and 4 year olds know how to turn things into weapons to beat each other with. Like puppies they seem to be testing limits to rough play. What surprised me is what happened when I didn't intervene: a few times the older one completely dominated and got his way. But more often than not the older one displayed empathy and tried to apologize and give kisses and give the y…

> I think kids have more ability to self regulate than we typically treat them as having. This "kids need adult supervision" is a relatively new thing, we used to be sent out to play as kids for HOURS (be home by dinner) and ran the woods and parks or played murderball (soccer with tackling) and other forms of roughhousing, all without serious mayhem. Parents would let us "work it out" if there was a fight.

"Kids are harmed by daily emotional and physical abuse from other kids" is also a relatively new thing. The past was not a rosy place for everyone.

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#393

Post by dr_orpheus »

nchase wrote: post #8
nchase wrote: post #5

This reminds me of when I was at grad student in that area. It was really frustrating to read all of the studies from e.g. Anderson and Bushman asserting the links between violent media and aggression. These publications were headline-grabbing, but some of the study design was laughable. The whole state of affairs led me to leave the discipline (which led me to a career as a software engineer). I'm glad that I did, b…

PS: if you want a real treat, take a look at how some of these studies measure "aggression". My favorite was where they used the volume of hot sauce poured into a cup as the measure of aggression. Hopefully they've come up with some better ways of measuring it since then.

Oh yeah, the "Hot Sauce Paradigm" easily quantifiable, never backed up that it actually correlates to aggression in real life. From Adachi and Willoughby (2011):

"Lieberman et al. [1999] found that scores on [the hot sauce] paradigm were positively related to both trait and physical aggression scores on the Buss and Perry (1992) Aggression Questionnaire, supporting the convergent validity of the Hot Sauce Paradigm, although to date no study has measured its association with aggressive behavior outside the lab."

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2cab/940f9292928a48d57c3752...

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#394

Post by SirYandi »

honkycat wrote: post #218
afandian wrote: post #117

I'm one of those people who is entirely bemused by violent videogames and films (I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be bemused by my pastimes too). I'm not trying to argue to stop anyone doing it, but I would really like to understand it better. Many video games are essentially simulators of things that we're prevented from doing in reality, because of the laws of nature or society. Whether that's dropping…

Honestly I feel like the mainstream games industry is pretty chaste. A large part of the audience is younger, and it is their parents who are buying the games. You want something to be engaging, maybe even edgy, but not so edgy that mom and dad wouldn't want little johnny playing it. Part of the equation is that combat is interesting to simulate. It has clear rules ( live or die ), a lot of different ways you can twe…

The closest examples of games where the main focus is violence for violence's sake are "Manhunt" and "Hatred". Both very controversial.

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#395

Post by iso8859-1 »

rriepe wrote: post #320
yazboo wrote: post #80

I have noticed that many social science articles posted on Hacker News bring out critical comments about study design, doubts about the strength of the study's conclusions, that kind of thing. This submission, on the other hand, is a link to some kind of gaming news website, which links to an abstract for an article in a Cyberpsychology (?) journal which costs $60 to access, and there is widespread and uncritical agr…

Hacker News users aren't smart, we just type good

Wouldn't it be better to use an adverb here?

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#396

Post by ABCLAW »

SkyBelow wrote: post #384
ABCLAW wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a fetish for this "don't trust your anecdotes" reply, when the reality is more nuanced. People will trust their anecdotes because in general they are right to. They don't need a double blind study to figure out that placing their hand on a heated element is a bad idea. The question is whether the Bayesian confidence an individual places on their anecdotal knowledge is appropriate or not. In this case,…

The issue is there is entire areas of psychology studying when we get things wrong. If it works until it doesn't, is it really something you should be trusted? Let us not forget that confirmation bias would also apply to how we judge the accuracy of our anecdotes. Is it that we don't really have that many cases where relying on personal anecdotes betrays us, or is it that we just diminish those incidents and pay more…

>If it works until it doesn't, is it really something you should be trusted?

Depends on why you need to trust something. If the failure state is multiple nukes going off, sure throw money and time at it until your systems are bullet proof. If you've purchased new shoes and need to design a study to figure out which foot you should start with when lacing up, maybe you're going too hard. What about something more chemical in nature; say you have a family recipe you and your family love. You might tinker around with it, but do you stop making it because you are upset by the intellectual sloth of not running double blind studies on Grandma's Famous Cumin Chili? No. Unless something slaps your Bayesian priors in the face, like a news report that says Chili recipes using Cumin might cause cancer.

Again, the idea is that we all come into this with Bayesian priors. You don't need (and will never get) 100% certainty to operate in the real world. I don't need to spend a few hours and $60 to go from 99.5% to 99.7% on this issue and I'm betting you don't either.

We will be, and largely are wrong about a ton of things. And in the majority of cases it doesn't matter one tiny bit. Like here. This is a study about a political flogging point that is 15 years past the point it conceivably could have been made into legislation. The study will be dated by the time there's a political push for the issue to be re-examined.

This is shoelace study v.2.0. We have more pertinent, more complicated and more impactful problems to study both on an institution and personal level, so why devote our limited mental processing time to this? Because you want to be "right"?

Have you ever read a recipe you've done before and thought to yourself "I really shouldn't make this, because I haven't presented this foo

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#397

Post by iso8859-1 »

vlunkr wrote: post #136
afandian wrote: post #117

I'm one of those people who is entirely bemused by violent videogames and films (I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be bemused by my pastimes too). I'm not trying to argue to stop anyone doing it, but I would really like to understand it better. Many video games are essentially simulators of things that we're prevented from doing in reality, because of the laws of nature or society. Whether that's dropping…

I would argue that in most games, the violence is not the goal, just the mechanics. You're either competing with other players, trying to fulfill a quest, surviving the zombie apocalypse, etc. Very few games are really "murder simulators" and when they do come along, even if they are meant to be satirical or something, they are usually controversial.

If the mechanics were sufficient, why are people not posting more pictures of airliners flying into buildings in Flight Simulator?

It is a simulator, so it has the best mechanics. The violence is the only thing missing. Flight Simulator will just display a boring dialog saying "you crashed".

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#398

Post by [deleted] »

mywittyname wrote: post #126
umvi wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably confirmation bias. Same reason a study with positive outcomes about coffee/alcohol/gay parenthood/gender reassignment/ are not criticized as much as a study on the same topic that had negative outcomes. We want certain things to be true so we (consciously or not) avoid criticizing studies bolstering what we want to be true and harshly criticize studies we want to be false. I like to think science always…

I mean, part of this is probably also some degree of us intuitively knowing the answer. If you have a friend group of 10 people, 4 of which regularly work out. You will probably notice that those 4 friends have less body fat and are more toned than the other 6. At that point, if a study came out saying that working out had no impact on body physique, you'd reflexively question the results. That might sound ridiculous…

[deleted]

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#400

Post by Aerroon »

aidenn0 wrote: post #194
umvi wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some truth here, but it's important not to use anecdotes too much to guide intuition because the sample size is often too small and too biased. For example, I have a group of 10 friends. All 10 of them (including myself) got covid, and we all agree it is no worse than the flu. I mean, yeah, we couldn't smell or taste for a few days, but we all recovered within a week. Therefore... I should reflexively questio…

To put it a different way, the people who grew up to be violent individuals are probably not posting on HN, nor working at companies with people who post on HN, so the fact that everybody on HN isn't violent, despite playing violent video games is only weak evidence against there being a correlation. In fact, I would be surprised for there to be zero correlation (even assuming there is no causation), as it is a reaso…

>In fact, I would be surprised for there to be zero correlation (even assuming there is no causation), as it is a reasonable assumption that naturally violent people are more likely to play violent video games.

There's a lot of violence in society. There's even more violent media available. From news broadcasts to internet forum posts to books. Perhaps violent video games aren't particularly worse at that than all of the other media that portray violence? The news tends to have stories that are more gruesome than the things that happen in video games. The violence in video games is usually toned down or limited.

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