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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: 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!!!