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Japan Gamer Study Claims Aggressive Behavior
Iowa State University has published a new study suggesting that videogames are a catalytic factor in developing a child’s aggressive behavior regardless of their cultural surroundings.
The academic study, published in the journal Pediatrics, was set up to address a common debate; do videogames evoke aggressive behavior or are aggressive people more drawn to games with violent content?
While the entire archive of important questions surrounding the influence of videogame violence can’t possibly be answered by such a narrowly-funneled debate, ISU psychology professor Craig Anderson has attempted to address a counter-argument often made by those associated with the videogame industry; that Japan’s low rate of reported violence suggests that games cannot be a sole contributing factor in aggressive behavior.
In attempting to address this counter-argument, professor Anderson measured a previous study from his 2007-published book (called Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents) with research from an associate professor of psychology at Ochanomizu University in Japan.
Anderson claims to have found similar findings from both studies, enough to say in an OSU press release that: "When you find consistent effects across two very different cultures, you're looking at a pretty powerful phenomenon. One can no longer claim this is somehow a uniquely-American phenomenon. This is a general phenomenon that occurs across cultures."
The US portion of the study had reproduced Anderson’s research from his 2007 book which focused on 364 school pupils in Minnesota. The children, aged 9-12, were reported to have an increased likelihood of getting into a fight or exhibiting physically aggressive behavior around five months after being subjected to violent videogames.
These results were then placed next to the research from Ochanomizu, which asked a total of 1,231 Japanese students to rate their own behavior in terms of physical aggression. Both studies claim to show complementary trends in aggressive behavior, with the report’s author claiming "the argument has been made - it's not a very good argument, but it's been made by the video game industry - that all our research on violent video game effects must be wrong because Japanese kids play a lot of violent video games and Japan has a low violence rate”.
"By gathering data from Japan, we can test that hypothesis directly and ask, 'Is it the case that Japanese kids are totally unaffected by playing violent video games?' And of course, they aren't. They're affected pretty much the same way American kids are," he concluded.
The study will be published in full in this month's issue of Pediatrics. Edge is seeking a copy for detail.
I accept that violent games incite some aggressiveness, as much as any other violent stimuli. I accept that some children can be more susceptible to this kind of stimuli and behavior more aggressively due to that. What I don’t accept is trying to transfer the educational responsibilities from parents and tutors to the videogame industry.
Judging from what this article says, it seems like quite a flawed scientific method. But then again psychology is the most wannabe-science of them all.
Did they also test a segment of children in the same demographic watching similarly violent movies, reading violent comics/books, and listening to violent music? And did they also do a control test where they test children who play non-violent video games, watch non-violent movies, listen to non-violent music, and read non-violent comics/books? If they did all that, I could potentially buy into the argument. But the problem is, when you're doing a test where you WANT the outcome to turn out a certain way, you don't do control tests to compare the results. Like drug companies using 30 people to test a medication's efficacy, 15 of them are on the med while the other 15 are using placebo and neither know which one they're on. Video-game testing needs to have the same level of bias free testing using control tests just like everything else. And really, that's one thing that you can't have conclusive enough evidence toward either argument, thus leaving the whole argument moot any way. It's only fair that video games are treated with the same level of scrutiny that movies, books, and music are, which is little to none.
Blasphemy.