The Research
Can watching violent video games make a kid more likely to act more physically aggressive over the course of a school year?
That was the question that Iowa State University Distinguished Professor of Psychology Craig Anderson wanted to answer in 2008. Dr. Anderson, the director of the school’s Center for the Study of Violence, is a well-known pioneer and leading researcher in video game effects. Since earning his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1980, he has spent the bulk of his professional career trying to research the impact that violent video games have on kids, even testifying before the U.S. Senate on the subject.
The study that he and his research associates conducted in 2008 examined the “longitudinal effects of violent video games in Japan and the United States.” Publishing their work in the journal Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Anderson and his team set out to see if violent video game exposure had an adverse effect on kids and teens over time, hypothesizing that exposure to violent video games early in a school year would predict physical aggressiveness later in the school year.1
They were right.
Using three different sample groups (364 U.S. third- to fifth-graders; 1,050 Japanese students aged 13 to 18; and a third sample consisting of 180 Japanese students aged 12 to 15), the researchers found that habitual violent video game playing earlier in the year predicted aggression when measured later in the school year (three to six months later)—even after statistically controlling for gender and previous physical aggressiveness.
Results from each sample group yielded “statistically reliable positive correlations” between HVGV (habitual video game violence) exposure and aggressive acts several months later “of a magnitude that falls in the medium to large range for longitudinal predictors of physical aggression and violence.” In research parlance, this is a “robust” effect—not something that happens just by chance.
The study noted that American children were playing (as of 2008, the time of the study) over four times more video games every week than they were in the 1980s (16–18 hours vs. 4 hours) and that previous research (Anderson et al., 2004; Dill et al., 1998) had shown a link between violent video gaming and aggressive behavior.
The researchers defined “aggression” as behavior that’s intended to harm another person and is not just an emotion, thought or intention; rather, “aggression,” for the purposes of the study, had to be an actual harmful act, such as kicking, punching, getting into fights, etc. For the Japanese students in the study, these behaviors were self-reported; for the American students, aggressive behavior was an index of teacher, peer and student self-reports of physical aggression.
Not only did the researchers conclude that “habitually playing violent video games leads to increases in physical aggression . . . relative to those who do not play violent video games,” but that those impacts were roughly the same in the American students and the Japanese students, even though the United States is considered an individualistic culture that has high levels of societal aggression and violence while Japan is considered a collectivist society with low levels of aggression and violence. Yet the gaming-and-increased-violence effect was the same in both, albeit more pronounced in the younger children, both in the United States and Japan.
The researchers concluded that this cross-cultural consistency of the increased-violence effect of gaming “illustrates the power of violent video games to affect children’s developmental trajectory in a harmful way.” The fact that the findings of a gaming-and-aggression link were so uniform also led the researchers to conclude: “These findings also contradict another popular alternative hypothesis: that only highly aggressive children (either by nature, culture or other socialization factors) will become more aggressive if repeatedly exposed to violent video games.”
In other words, it wasn’t just the already aggressive kids who were affected—all kids who were exposed to violent games became more aggressive. The researchers hypothesized that the underlying psychological mechanism of this increased aggression was “exposure to violent models, in either the real world or in entertainment media,” which “teaches a host of aggression-enhancing behavioral scripts, attitudes and beliefs.”
The fact that people—and especially children—learn new behaviors by observing “models” in, as the researchers point out, “either the real world or in entertainment media” is a key precept in Social Learning Theory. But the researchers hypothesize that this monkey-see, monkey-do phenomenon is increased by the “interactive nature of video games . . . [and] their immersive qualities, the fact that the user is an enactor as well as an observer of aggression.”
To that I would also add the visual intensity and graphic realism of the latest generation of video games, coupled with, as I mentioned in chapter three, the frequent “reward schedule” and repetition of something as highly dopaminergic as video gaming, only further intensifies the strong shaping and “modeling” potential effect of violent video games.
Some more research:
A 2014 study titled “The Effect of Online Violent Video Games on Levels of Aggression” by Dr. Jack Hollingdale, University of Sussex, United Kingdom, and Dr. Tobias Greitemeyer, University of Innsbruck in Austria, found that participants who played violent video games showed more aggression than those who played neutral video games.2
The researchers randomly divided 101 students into violent gaming and nonviolent gaming groups. The violent gaming group played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare for 30 minutes while the nonviolent group played Little Big Planet 2 for 30 minutes. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is an ultraviolent military first-person-shooter game set in both Middle Eastern and Russian combat zones, with the player being either a U.S. marine or a British commando. The game involves realistic shooting and killing of enemy soldiers. In contrast, Little Big Planet 2 is an innocuous, cartoon-like puzzle platform game that features the lovable Sackboy as the primary character.
After the participants played their respective video games, their levels of aggression were measured surreptitiously, using the “chili sauce paradigm,” a method that has been successfully used in other studies to measure aggression.
What’s the chili sauce paradigm, you might ask? After their 30 minutes of video gaming, the students were asked to participate in a bogus marketing survey, ostensibly to investigate a new hot chili sauce recipe. The students were not made aware that the chili survey was fake or that it had anything to do with their just-completed gaming experience.
The students were asked to season food with the chili sauce in question—a very spicy recipe that they were told was “3 out of 3” in “hotness”—for a taste tester who, the students were told, “couldn’t stand hot chili sauce” but was participating in exchange for good pay.
The students were also told that they themselves weren’t required to taste the seasoned food. After the students left the room, the researchers were able to measure the amount, in grams, of hot sauce that the participants had added with the idea that the amount of hot sauce added for an anonymous taste-tester represented the participants’ animus or aggression level.
The researchers found that those students who had just played Call of Duty added significantly more hot sauce during the chili sauce paradigm. Now, does this mean that adding more hot chili sauce means that they’re also more likely to shoot up a school? Of course not. But it does indicate that playing violent games raises one’s aggression. And, as we’ve already noted, that can be especially problematic for those with underlying psychiatric vulnerabilities.
A similar conclusion was reached by Kansas State University researcher C. Barlett in a 2007 study published in the journal Aggressive Behavior.3 In his research paper, entitled “Longer You Play, the More Hostile You Feel: Examination of First Person Shooter Video Games and Aggression During Video Game Play,” Barlett’s team measured physiological arousal and how aggressively participants would respond to three hypothetical scenarios after playing the first-person-shooter-game Time Crisis 3 for 15 minutes over two separate trials.
Their conclusion?
“This study adds to the existing literature on video games and aggression by showing that increased play of a violent first person shooter video game can significantly increase aggression from baseline.”
Interestingly, aggression researchers have identified frustration and the presence of blood and gore as “aggression eliciting factors.” Indeed, in a fascinating 1996 study by Ballard and Wiest, published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, the researchers made a discovery about Mortal Kombat II, a competitive martial arts–style video game in which competitors can fight each other to the death.4 In earlier versions of the game, players were able to turn off the digital blood, which spilled copiously; participants who played with the “blood function” turned on had a significant increase in hostility as compared with those who had disabled the blood function.
We can hypothesize that seeing blood—even video game blood—triggers something primordial in our ancient reptilian brain, where the fight-or-flight response lives. For eons, blood equaled violence and danger, which is not an association that a twenty-first-century gamer can choose to shut off.
This notion that seeing more graphically violent imagery can make a person more aggressive was also echoed by Dr. Russell G. Geen, a professor at the University of Missouri and the author of Human Aggression (1990). He theorizes that seeing (or visualizing) violent depictions can “prime” an individual to act upon aggressive thoughts or emotions.
An illuminating 2011 study published in the journal Psychological Science by Dr. Tobias Greitemeyer, from the University of Innsbruck in Austria, and Dr. Neil McLatchie, from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, concluded that playing violent video games “increased dehumanization, which in turn evoked aggressive behavior. Thus, it appears that video-game-induced aggressive behavior is triggered when victimizers perceive the victim to be less than human.”5
We know from history that when people are dehumainized—as Jews were in Nazi Germany or blacks were during slavery—it becomes easier to inflict violence on them. According to Dr. Greitemeyer’s research, playing violent video games desensitizes the player to the basic humanity of all people; it dehumanizes them, thus making them easier to hurt.
Dr. Greitemeyer also published another study in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology in 2013, titled “The Changing Face of Aggression: The Effect of Personalized Avatars in a Violent Video Game on Levels of Aggressive Behavior.”6 His study concluded that gamers who had designed their own avatars were significantly more aggressive than those who played nonviolent games and even more aggressive that those who played violent video games but used generic avatars. There seems to be an empowering effect when a person “creates” his or her own digital persona; one can only imagine the potentially adverse and violent aspect of that empowering effect on the troubled, alienated kids of the world, like Newtown’s Adam Lanza.
Now let’s take a look at a brain-imaging study. Brain-imaging studies are particularly wonderful in that they offer very clear evidence of any adverse neurophysiological effects as a result of video gaming.
Recall that in chapter three, we discussed Dr. Yang Wang’s work at the Indiana University School of Medicine in 2011. His brain-imaging research was the first of its kind that clearly showed a direct relationship between playing violent video games and measurable brain changes that included “less activation in certain frontal brain regions (regions that control aggression, self-control and emotion) following one week of playing violent video games.”7
According to Dr. Wang: “These findings indicate that violent video game play has a long-term effect on brain functioning. These effects may translate into behavioral changes over longer periods of game play. . . . The affected brain regions are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior . . .”
Thus people with compromised frontal brain regions tend to be much more impulsive and potentially aggressive; this, in turn, helps us to understand from a neurological perspective what those aggression studies were showing. Since Dr. Wang’s research showed frontal lobe effects after just one week of violent gaming, the question then becomes: what might happen to kids after years of violent video gaming?
Finally, in a masterful summary of years’ worth of research, Iowa State University’s Dr. Craig Anderson, in the most comprehensive meta-study review ever conducted in this area, exhaustively analyzed 130 research studies with more than 130,000 participants worldwide. The result, he found, “proves conclusively that exposure to violent video games makes more aggressive, less caring kids—regardless of their age, sex or culture.” Published in 2010 in the APA journal Psychological Bulletin, the study concluded that violent games are not just a correlation, but a causal risk factor for increased aggressive thoughts and behavior.8
Dr. Anderson had more to say about his conclusions:
“We can now say with utmost confidence that regardless of research method—that is experimental, correlational, or longitudinal—and regardless of the cultures tested in this study [East and West], you get the same effects. And the effects are that exposure to violent video games increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in both short-term and long-term contexts.”
I know that when I speak to my gaming clients, they tell me that if they’ve been playing a violent game all weekend they are more prone to be aggressive. “I’m definitely more amped and would get into a fight if someone bumped into me or mouthed off” was how one of my gamers put it.
Another young man, “Sam,” who, after playing Call of Duty all weekend, came into my office the following Monday and proudly proclaimed: “I did it! I signed up for the marines! Now I can go kill for real!” When I asked him what he was talking about, he said that he had been so pumped up after playing the game all weekend that he wanted the chance to do the real thing. When I reminded him that Call of Duty is a game that can be turned off, and that the Iraq War is real and has no off button, he just grinned and said, “Yeah, I know!”
Dr. Anderson, who has spent the bulk of his professional research career studying video games’ effects on aggression, believes that the debate over whether or not video games increase aggressive behavior is now over: “From a public policy standpoint, it’s time to get off the question of, ‘Are there real and serious effects?’ That’s been answered and answered repeatedly. It’s now time to move on to a more constructive question like, ‘How do we make it easier for parents—within the limits of culture, society and law—to provide a healthier childhood for their kids?’”
* * *
Dr. Brad Bushman, one of the researchers who most strongly asserts the link between video games and aggression, has this to say about making the leap from aggression to actual physical violence: “On average, the research shows that exposure to violent video games increases aggressive thoughts, it increases angry feelings, it increases physiological arousal such as heart rate and blood pressure, which may explain why it also increases aggressive behavior. . . . Are they more likely to stab someone? I dunno. Are they more likely to shoot someone? I dunno. Are they more likely to rape someone? Beats me. Those are very rare events and we can’t study them ethically . . . we can’t give our participants knives and guns and see what they do with them. . . . But we know that there is a link between playing violent video games and more common forms of aggressive behavior—such as getting in fights.”
But not everyone agrees with that. As mentioned, Dr. Ferguson disputes the notion that violent video games are problematic and has been very critical of the aggression research. The only problem is that his critiques of the voluminous aggression research are, at best, faulty arguments. And Dr. Ferguson’s own headline-making 2014 research study—which inspired literally dozens of news stories and blogs that breathlessly screamed: “Long Term Study Finds Zero Link Between Violence in Video Games and Real Life Violence” (an actual headline)—was, as I’ll explain, fatally flawed in its assumptions and conclusions.9
But that didn’t matter—it made for great headlines and guilt-free gaming; one gaming blog, using Ferguson’s “no link” study as its headline, opened with the reassuring line: “Go ahead and keep playing Grand Theft Auto.” Game on!
So what did Dr. Ferguson, who, interestingly, is the author of the fictional thriller Suicide Kings (2013), about a Luciferian death cult, actually research in his study to draw the “no link” conclusions?
He used as his two experimental variables rates of media violence (both in television and in video games) and national youth crime rate statistics to see if there was any connection between the two. Feeling that previous studies in “laboratory” settings were too artificial to gather good data—although several longitudinal aggression studies collected their data over time from the “real world”—Ferguson decided that culling youth crime stats and comparing them with analyses of violent video game playing would answer the old does-media-cause-violence question.
Before we even look at his results, what might we think is a problem with the way that Ferguson’s study is constructed? Unfortunately, Ferguson didn’t just look at a particular sample group of gamers and monitor their violent episodes or violent behaviors over time; instead, he considered the entire youth population, among which gaming usage had significantly increased, and then looked at national statistics for youth crime.
When he did that, Ferguson saw an inverse relationship: video gaming had gone up while youth crime rates had gone down. Cue the screaming headlines: No Link Between Violent Video Games and Real Life Violence!
But what about the intervening variables? Usually, when trying to see if one experimental variable is impacting another experimental variable—in this case, violent video games and actual player violence—experimenters try to create studies that minimize or account for any other “intervening variables,” or variables that could also be impacting the results.
We know that crime rates as a whole have decreased from the 1990s to the present. This has been variously credited to: better policing practices, youth gang intervention programs, youth drug and alcohol treatment programs. These crime rate interventions have proven to be effective because we know that the vast majority of violent crime is gang- or drug-related.
In fact, according to the FBI Web site, 48 percent of violent crime is gang-related (2011), while an ABC News report stretches that number to 80 percent, saying that “as many as one million gang members are believed to be responsible for as much as 80% of crime in America.”10 These gang-related crime statistics have nothing to do with video games and everything to do with gang culture and violent drug trafficking.
Yet, oddly, the fact that national crime-reducing programs have been effective is being hailed as “data” that violent video games don’t increase gamer aggression. That’s a bizarre conclusion. Unfortunately, Ferguson didn’t study a more targeted sample group of, say, extreme gamers (who play 25 hours a week or more) in order to measure how their aggression levels were affected across time; instead, he looked at misleading overall national youth crime stats.
The other problem with relying on crime stats as the barometer of gamer aggression is that most aggressive or violent acts are not reported as crimes; if I kick my sister, odds are that a police report won’t be filed, but it is, nonetheless, an aggressive and violent act.
Thankfully, even though Dr. Ferguson’s head-scratcher of a study found a “strong correlation” between violent video game consumption and declines in youth crime stats, he conceded that this downward correlation was likely related to “chance” and “should not be taken as an indication that playing violent video games can lead to a safer world.”
Unfortunately, this flawed study with its untenable conclusions gets a significant amount of news ink. In spite of the misleading nature of his own work, the ubiquitous Dr. Ferguson is very critical of other aggression studies. When pointing out methodological flaws, he cites the fact that many of the studies have used college students and not children, arguing that college students are more prone to give researchers the responses they want to hear, a type of response bias known in the research world as “demand characteristics”: “Of course most of these college students probably have heard theories about media violence and aggression, because they’re in college and taking these classes. . . . [A] typical college student can draw that link of what they’re supposed to do, basically.” College students are more likely than kids to show evidence of aggression, Ferguson speculates, because “these college students are guessing what they’re supposed to do and doing it, in order to get their extra credit.”
But Dr. Ferguson’s tortured explanation doesn’t make sense; in studies in which students participate for extra credit, that credit is not contingent on the nature of their responses, one way or another. In other studies, middle and high school children were used rather than college students. Dr. Ferguson’s dismissal, on those rather speculative grounds, of research—which, he acknowledges, demonstrates increased aggression—doesn’t hold water.
Other critics and video game enthusiasts have attempted to dispute some of the increased-aggression findings by suggesting that, perhaps, more-aggressive kids are gravitating to violent games—so that, in chicken-or-the-egg fashion, the aggression that’s being measured in frequent gamers was a preexisting condition, as it were.
But that’s refuted by both Dr. Anderson’s and Dr. Wang’s studies; in Dr. Anderson’s study, a baseline for aggression was determined, and the aggressive acts came later in the year; additionally, the same effects were shown in “low-aggression” Japanese students. In Dr. Wang’s study, the brain imaging was done before and after the exposure to the violent games, which clearly showed that the measurable brain changes were a byproduct of the exposure to the game.
Dr. Ferguson has also suggested that perhaps what’s being measured in some of the studies as increased aggression is actually frustration that participants experience when they’re asked to stop playing the game after 15 or 30 minutes.
Here Dr. Ferguson and I agree, although probably for different reasons. Given the addictive potential of hyperarousing games, a gamer can indeed become very frustrated—and angry—if a game is taken away.
According to Dr. Michael Fraser, a professor at Weil Cornell Medical College and a clinical psychologist who treats kids and teenagers with Internet addiction, it’s not just the violent content of games but, as with any addict, the threat of having the object of obsession taken away that can lead to impulsive aggressiveness and even physical violence: “Kids can become physically and verbally abusive. Most parents have trouble imagining this—that their 12-year-old boy would push his mother when she tries to unplug the game.”11
Dr. Kimberly Ross, a psychologist and the founder of the Center for Online and Internet Addiction, agrees: “There definitely seems to be a correlation between violent game use and aggressive behavior. Kids throw things, they’ll hit their parents, they’ll start becoming violent at school. Parents say, ‘He was a good boy; he didn’t act like this before.’” Indeed, I’ve also worked with several families who have been attacked by their kids, some mentioned already in this book, when the kids’ devices were taken away.
Odds are that most of the abovementioned types of increased aggression and violence never make it to national crime stats that Dr. Ferguson uses as data. Yet according to Dr. Young and Dr. Fraser, while the Adam Lanza–type cases are exceedingly rare, increased “everyday” aggression—like kids’ shoving or pushing parents who attempt to take away their games—is becoming increasingly more common.
The extreme cases that do make the news—like many of the “ripped from the headlines” stories that we’ll explore in the next chapter—share similarities to and parallels with drug addiction and the violent way that addicts can react when their drugs are taken away.
Indeed, there’s an old saying in the drug addiction recovery community: “Never get in between a drug addict and their drugs.” In the next chapter, we’ll see just how explosively violent gaming addicts can be when their drug of choice is taken away.