More than 200 academics have signed an open letter criticizing a controversial new statement [PDF] by the American Psychological Association suggesting a link between violent video games and increased aggression.
The APA writes:
It is the accumulation of risk factors that tends to lead to aggressive or violent behaviour. The research reviewed here demonstrates that violent video game use is one such risk factor.
A positive association between violent video game use and increased aggressive behavior was found in most (12 of 14 studies) but not all studies published after the earlier meta‐analyses. This continues to be a reliable finding and shows good multi‐method consistency across various representations of both violent video game exposure and aggressive behavior.
However, the group of academics said they felt the methodology of the research was deeply flawed as a significant part of material included in the study had not been subjected to peer review. "I fully acknowledge that exposure to repeated violence may have short-term effects - you would be a fool to deny that - but the long-term consequences of crime and actual violent behaviour, there is just no evidence linking violent video games with that," said one.
"If you play three hours of Call of Duty you might feel a little bit pumped, but you are not going to go out and mug someone."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @03:15AM
Just finished 3 hours of CoD, gonna go out and mug some people. Wait, what? I can't blame video games for my crimes? Well shit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by davester666 on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:39AM
Of course not. Well, unless you also kill your victims...
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 18 2015, @03:18AM
FTFY. You see, the original "Citicize" may cause confusions and lead someone to believe the APA research is criticized: can't have that now, can we?
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @03:19AM
A well-adjusted kid who's doing well in school, is reasonably mature for his age and is popular with classmates might be able to play lots of violent video games with no ill effects.
But what about a kid who's a loser, who gets D's in class and whose main hobby is doing drugs? The video games might give him a feeling of control that was utterly absent in his life
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @03:29AM
Enlistment in the marines is supposed to be for. But nowadays you have to ship him off to the army.
Don't worry thought, he won't be any more fucked up than the rest of the Vets coming back from .
:)
(Score: 3, Funny) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:47AM
You accidently a few word.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @09:51PM
your GD comment should not
continue from the subject to the text!!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 18 2015, @03:31AM
http://www.wired.com/2012/06/drone-pilot-ptsd/ [wired.com]
http://www.livescience.com/40959-military-drone-war-psychology.html [livescience.com]
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/06/a_chilling_new_post_traumatic_stress_disorder_why_drone_pilots_are_quitting_in_record_numbers_partner/ [salon.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by fadrian on Tuesday August 18 2015, @03:02PM
Of course - responses change in every subject. But they're looking at statistical measures here, not the individuals and what may drive them - at this point in the research, what any particular individual does, unless enough do that action so as to make it statistically relevant. I think what you're trying to suggest is that a large number of individuals may play violent video games and still not have increased aggressive response. If so, the statistics will show it.
That is all.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:50AM
Nope. Video games just made the high better, along with some twinkies and pizza.
Ever play Call of Duty? Ever play Call of duty...on weed?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:36AM
I don't see any reason to believe mere video games would have any significant effect on such a person.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday August 18 2015, @08:09AM
I certainly prefer if he feels that type of control by playing video games, than if he feels that type of control by bullying real people.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @03:35AM
It was deeply flawed due to lack of peer review? What evidence is there that peer review is even useful? The answer is none, look it up.
Without looking at it I am sure this research is deeply flawed because all they did is see if there was positive or negative correlations without really trying to rule out other things that could explain the relationship. Likely they also did not attempt to, or were unable to, get good estimates of the file drawer effect (studies showing small effects or those in the "wrong" direction do not get published).
I say that as standard criticisms without reading any of this literature, based purely on prior experience that people who hold up peer review as some kind of useful obstacle to overcome have no idea what they are doing. Of course getting other people to give competent feedback on your work is useful, that seems to have nothing to do with any formalized peer review process.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Francis on Tuesday August 18 2015, @03:44AM
Peer review has issues, but if something isn't peer reviewed, then that says something about the research. Usually it means that it's of poor quality or outside the realm of generally accepted science. It's definitely possible, and too common, for the people doing the peer review to be biased or unfairly generous to the notions, but removing even that is going to harm the reliability of the papers being written.
(Score: 2) by Aichon on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:10PM
What evidence is there that peer review is even useful? The answer is none, look it up.
Without looking at it I am sure this research is deeply flawed [...]
Double standard much, asking us to look for evidence without doing so yourself? And there are plenty of meta-analyses on the subject, contrary to your assertions.
But really, just think of peer review like a spam filtering process for research papers: a good peer review process won't fix everything, but it will SIGNIFICANTLY improve the situation. Reading unfiltered stuff is generally a waste of your time since the stuff that can't pass peer review is rarely worth the ink used to print it. That said, not all "peer review" is created equal, and some of it, admittedly, is downright crappy, but dismissing the entire idea of peer review just because we can point to cases where it's come up short is like dismissing the idea that spam filters on e-mail provide a benefit, just because you know about a guy with a bad filter that lets everything through.
During my time in grad school, my research group had a weekly seminar in which we reviewed hundreds of papers in our field (Internet research, mostly focused on search engines and related areas). We'd skewer nearly all of them for having some combination of: edge cases they hadn't considered, data that was missing, overstated assertions, or insufficient information by which to judge the claimed results. But that's to be expected, since it's basically impossible to have a perfect paper that covers everything.
Papers that we had picked up from highly-regarded or even just averagely-regarded conferences and journals in our field (i.e. ones that had acceptance rates less than about 15%) would generally only result in minor quibbles from us. They were nearly always solid papers with solid research. We almost always saw room for improving them, but we rarely saw the sort of glaring issues that would cause us to question how the paper got published.
Papers from "peer-reviewed" conferences and journals we had never heard of would routinely result in multi-hour roasts, during which we'd pull out a lot of hair, gnash a lot of teeth, and do a lot of questioning about whether an advanced degree was worthwhile if it'd mean having those authors as our "peers". They were nearly always a waste of time. I recall one "peer-reviewed" paper I read that had a heading for Data and a heading for Results with nothing at all under either of them. I kid you not. And I'm sure we're all aware of robo-generated papers and the like that have managed to get published in "peer-reviewed" publications, which just goes to show that the peer review process is only as good as your peers.
Papers from non-peer-reviewed sources either followed the same pattern as the ones I just talked about, or they would have us slamming the plain-as-day corporate/government interests that were driving the obvious narrative present throughout the paper. We wouldn't even bother analyzing all of the issues with them. Instead, we'd get a laugh out of the soundbite-laden abstract that had made the news and how poorly it matched up with the shoddy-as-hell research that backed it up, we'd see how well we could predict which pieces of data would be conspicuously missing since we could make a pretty good guess at what it would have shown and would know that it wouldn't fit their predetermined narrative, and we'd generally learn more from about the truth of the situation from what was not said than what was actually said. On rare occasion you'd find a diamond in the rough, but those were definitely the exceptions, not the rule.
All of which is to say, you're quite right that just because a paper is "peer reviewed" it really doesn't mean much about the quality of the research, but you're quite wrong to suggest that the peer review process provides no benefit whatsoever. It's a filtering process, and like any other filtering process, it's only as good as your filter. Check the acceptance rate at the publication and how often the papers it publishes are cited in other publications with low acceptance rates, and you'll likely get a good idea for how reputable the publication is and whether you can generally trust the papers it publishes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @04:26AM
I did look, I only found papers questioning its value. I can't post a link to a lack of results. If there are plenty, share one.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheLink on Tuesday August 18 2015, @03:58AM
Seems to me people who spend hours playing COD and other FPS are less likely to kill or seriously injure me.
Why? Because they are too busy playing games to meet me, much less kill me. And if they spend huge amounts of time they might even be less physically fit than me. Those spending hours on the street looking for victims are more dangerous than those spending hours at home or in a cybercafe attacking virtual victims.
Better for them to be playing games and shoot and stab each other in a virtual world than shoot or stab each other in the real world. Better for them to join a game clan than a real world gang: http://www.ojjdp.gov/jjbulletin/9808/history.html [ojjdp.gov]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_in_the_United_States#Gang_demographics_and_ethnic_gangs [wikipedia.org]
Supposedly violent crime rates have been going down perhaps that's because lots of young guys even gangsters are spending less time on bashing up people and more time COD?
See this article (plenty of similar ones):
http://time.com/3577026/crime-rates-drop-1970s/ [time.com]
The rate of violent crime is 367.9 crimes for every 100,000 people, which marked a 5.1 percent decline since 2012. The rate has fallen each year since at least 1994.
Possible reasons for the decline include the country’s high incarceration rate, an aging population and an increased use of security cameras and cell phone videos capturing incidents.
Or because DOOM was released in 1993 creating a safer outlet for people with violent tendencies.
See I can make up plausible bullshit too just like them researchers ;).
(Score: 2, Informative) by Post-Nihilist on Tuesday August 18 2015, @04:04AM
Unleaded fuel dammit, they should know about it...www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-caused-americas-violent-crime-epidemic/
Be like us, be different, be a nihilist!!!
(Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Tuesday August 18 2015, @04:50AM
Abortion is also a common theory, as explained in freakonomics.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Post-Nihilist on Tuesday August 18 2015, @04:57AM
The lead theory is more dense ;)
Be like us, be different, be a nihilist!!!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Farkus888 on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:36AM
The story of leaded gasoline is interesting if you don't know it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr. [wikipedia.org]
Probably the most environmentally destructive single person to ever live.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday August 18 2015, @08:18AM
Here's the link to normal Wikipedia, to save all other desktop users the trouble of URL editing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr. [wikipedia.org]
Who on earth had the idea for those stupid separate links for mobile? The original idea of the web was to separate content from presentation so that every page would display well on every system. But then, web designers took over …
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @08:28AM
irks me too, especially since CSS can enable different render modes for output on devices such as printers, so the facility to render a "mobile" version was there, but no one uses it because no one can grock all the damn standards.
(Score: 1) by Post-Nihilist on Wednesday August 19 2015, @03:02AM
I am in total agreement with your assessment of that bastard
Be like us, be different, be a nihilist!!!
(Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Tuesday August 18 2015, @04:56AM
It seems that any video game with bad controls causes aggression. One of the early papers claiming violent games cause violence messed up controlling for this effect. The non violent game was a simple point and click interface, the violent game was a full 3d mouse and keyboard shooter. All of the subjects were non gamers to keep their past playing from confusing the results.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday August 18 2015, @12:08PM
Proof @2:40 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsQFYceNZS8 [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:06AM
It wasn't the violent imagery of the gameplay that fueled their rage. In fact, they could not play the game because the Steam servers were "too busy" just then. That's when the riots started again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:40AM
American Psychological Association.
What, a clown association?
No, American Psychological Association.
A quack association?
No, American Psychological Association.
A quack says what?
American Psychological ...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:21AM
Bad science from the social sciences? What a surprise. [arachnoid.com] They often try to measure subjective emotions and come to arbitrary conclusions based on poorly-gathered data. They mix up correlation with causation and overstate their confidence. The studies are rarely replicated, and when they are, the results often aren't even the same. Anyone putting trust in the social 'sciences' is a fool.
The media seems to love it, because it can be used for propaganda purposes. There is plenty of bad science for them to use, so no one can claim their reporting is incorrect, and many people will not question the studies themselves. Conclusions of social science studies can often be used to advocate for government intervention, because they are about the behavior of people. "Violent video games cause people to be more aggressive? We have to ban them!" It's far more useful for propaganda purposes than other fields, which is why bad science can be far more harmful.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Tuesday August 18 2015, @08:52PM
psychology is not a social science. that entire link is one long stawman, intentionally defining psychology as something its not.
from the wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]
Psychology is the study of mind* [wikipedia.org] and behavior. It is an academic discipline and an applied science which seeks to understand individuals and groups by establishing general principles and researching specific cases. In this field, a professional practitioner or researcher is called a psychologist and can be classified as a social, behavioral [wikipedia.org], or cognitive scientist [wikipedia.org]. Psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior, while also exploring the physiological and biological processes that underlie cognitive functions and behaviors.
* Mind:
A mind is the set of cognitive faculties (physical brain structures) that enables consciousness, perception, thinking, judgement, and memory—a characteristic of humans, but which also may apply to other life forms.
psychology includes some social science stuff, but it is very much a hard science, dealing with anything that has to do with the brain and nerves and includes all forms of neuroscience and neurology/neurobiology, many forms of pharmacology and toxicology, and lots of other stuff. of the 3 major branches (cognitive, behavioral, social), only the social branch has anything to do with "social science", while the majority is just as "hard" a science as physics and biology.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @12:35AM
psychology is not a social science. that entire link is one long stawman, intentionally defining psychology as something its not.
Sorry, but no. You can't look at garbage like what this article is about and pretend there isn't a problem by saying, "Well, technically, psychology covers more than just social sciences..." That's missing the point spectacularly.
psychology includes some social science stuff
Which is what is under discussion. Even brain scans are repeatedly abused to reach arbitrary and subjective conclusions about behavior. The social sciences are just the worst part of it.
while the majority is just as "hard" a science as physics and biology.
Well, thanks for the laugh.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Wednesday August 19 2015, @04:30AM
there's no "technically" about it, that entire rant you linked is nothing but a strawman because it defines psychology as something its not. since its fallicious from the start, the entire thing is invalid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 20 2015, @11:16AM
there's no "technically" about it, that entire rant you linked is nothing but a strawman because it defines psychology as something its not.
A straw man of who or what? Who specifically is that article straw manning? Or do you just mean to say it is incorrect for defining psychology in that way?
Also, that is "technically". You decide to focus on the inconsequential while missing the larger point. I don't know why.
since its fallicious from the start, the entire thing is invalid.
No, you haven't disproved the conclusion merely by finding what you perceive as a few fallacies.
1 + 1 = 3
2 + 2 = 5
3 + 3 = 6
Despite the fact that the first two are wrong, the third one is still correct. Trying to say that everything about the article is incorrect merely because you believe you've spotted some fallacies is just silly.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Thursday August 20 2015, @09:21PM
the rant in the article you linked is entirely based upon defining psychology as a "social science", which it is not. since it is based on a false premise, the conclusion cannot be trusted to be valid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:47AM
I can believe there is a positive association between violent games and real violence. After all, violent people need to relax just like everyone else, and somehow I get the feeling that they would be likely to pick violent games.
As for games causing violence, I'd say something like Tetris or even worse, Eryi's Action would be more likely. Now those can be rage inducing. Call of Duty is more likely to cause obesity in 10-14 year olds.
(Score: 1) by TechieRefugee on Tuesday August 18 2015, @02:18PM
What is exactly meant by "aggressive behavior?" Is competitiveness included under this, because if so, I feel that I have to say a resounding, "no shit."
(Score: 1) by unzombied on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:21PM
Let's take the US as an example. Some 2/3rds of the population play video games [esrb.org] (infographic), a substantial portion of which are violent games. Since the early 1980s, violent crimes have beein going down [wikipedia.org]. If violent games are a risk factor, given their popularity roughly correlates with a downward plunge of criminal violence, the factor appears negative in the real world, if not in the psychological statistical one.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Wednesday August 19 2015, @12:37AM
Yeah, but someone could just say that some unknown factors are causing the reduction of violent crimes, and reduce it more than video games raise it. They are desperate, and I've seen it done before.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Wednesday August 19 2015, @03:02AM
Can VGs trigger violent behavior? Possibly, but so can a wrong look at someone, or a bad driver, etc.
Can it be an stimulus that accumulates frustration in someone to ultimately build up violence behavior? Probably, but so can a ton on things in everyday life like being rejected by someone, being patronized randomly by bullies, having a bad day at work, etc.
Should we ban all these potential trigger and stimulus? Sure, if we want to live in a totalitarian nanny state and function like emotionless automatons..