PC World
04-13-07
by Matt Peckham
Violent Cases: A Conversation with Professor Doug Gentile
Nothing gets clicks like spotlighting polemical figures, e.g. Jack Thompson or
Senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman...which is why you'll hear nothing
more of them in this entry. Instead, I want to take a serious look at something
that drew my attention last Monday, when Medical News Today reported on new
studies conducted by three Iowa State University researchers. Those studies
appear to offer strong correlational evidence between violent video game
exposure and unhealthy aggressive behavior in children and adolescents. The
results were published in a recent book Violent Video Game Effects on Children
and Adolescents.
I spoke with study researcher Doug Gentile, Assistant Professor of
Psychology at ISU, by phone on Wednesday. (The interview follows, to be
published in four parts.)
doug_gentile.jpg Game On: Looking at the first study, where you had people play
violent and non-violent games, then tested them on their subsequent inclination
to punish a live person with loud noises, the result was that participants who
played the violent games--even if they were children's games--cranked out higher
noise blasts. But how are the violent games they played any different from other
stimuli like caffeine and sugar, or competitive sports like football?
Doug Gentile: I think it's a very important question you ask. I would phrase the
question somewhat differently, say in terms of how it's different from other
aggression enhancing circumstances or provocations, such as if you insult
someone, or if someone has a prior history of being aggressive, or if the room
temperature is uncomfortably hot, i.e. issues we know that all tend to increase
aggression. But the short answer is it's not different, and that in fact, media
violence exposure is just one among many dozens of risk factors for increased
aggression. We also know, for instance, that things which increase arousal can
increase aggression. I don't personally know of any studies looking at caffeine
and aggression, but alcohol has certainly been linked to increased aggressive
behavior. But even if we just made you run around, and your heart rate is up,
your blood pressure is up, and so on, that can also result in increased aggressive
behavior in the short term. That's one of the things I think people misunderstand
about this research, that aggression researchers aren't out to pick on games.
They're out to try to understand all of the factors that can go into making
someone more likely to be aggressive over time. And violent video games are
just one of those risk factors. They're not the biggest. They're also not the
smallest.
GO: Is there anything distinctive about the sort of aggressive activity you're
measuring?
DG: Yes, and I'll give you two answers. First, violent and non-violent games need
to be matched. For example, we know that frustration increases aggression, so if
the violent game is just a harder game to play, then it's not necessarily the
violence that provokes aggression. Or in fact if the non-violent game is
frustrating, you could actually get people being more aggressive in the nonviolent condition. So there are a number of features that we match to the games
to determine how frustrating they are, how fun they are, how boring they are, how
difficult to play, and so on. It's a list of some ten different dimensions that we try
to match the games on ahead of time. So they're equally fun, equally frustrating,
but only different in terms of whether they include violence or not. So is there
something distinctive? We try to make them as equivalent as possible with the
exception that one includes violent actions.
GO: How do you interpret a "violent action"?
DG: Aggression researchers have a very clear definition of this, that it would be
behavior that is intended to harm another being that would not want to be
harmed. So under that definition, football is no longer aggression. You can play it
in kind of an aggressive way, but you're not actually intending to injure the other
people. With that in mind, even many cartoonish E-rated children's games are
violent. They're just not bloody. You know, you shoot a ray gun and things
disappear, and there's happy music and bright colors. And yet--and here's what's
surprising about study one--we've assumed that what matters is how realistic the
violence is. But in study one what we found is that even the children's games that
included violence by this definition ("intending to harm someone who'd rather not
be") had the same size effect as T-rated games, which are more graphic, and the
same size effect as M-rated games in other studies that we've done. And that
was true whether we were talking about kids playing them, or college students
playing them. Even college students playing E-rated games with violent content
were more aggressive than after playing children's game without any. When the
public judges these games, they tend to do so base on how graphic a game is,
rather than whether it meets this definition of intentional harm.