Aggression and Video Games: Do Violent Video Games Induce Aggressive Attitudes and Behaviors?

Video games are often cited as a cause of mass violence. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton asked federal agencies to investigate violent media. More recently, National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre directed blame toward video games in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. President Trump similarly linked violent video games to the February 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The President recently oversaw a roundtable discussion with video game executives and conservative activists to discuss games as a factor contributing to violence.

Political efforts to address video game violence can point to supportive results from past studies. Researchers have looked into the impacts of violent games on aggression and have found some evidence in favor of correlation. Significantly, these studies have focused primarily on immediate short-term influences of violent video games—effects that may last less than five minutes.

In a recent study, a team of German researchers led by Simone Kühn took a different approach and focused on the long-term impact of video games on aggression. Using a longitudinal intervention study design, the researchers tested their hypothesis that long-term exposure to violent video games does not increase aggression or decrease pro-social behaviors.

In their study, Kühn et al. used a sample of 90 college students and adults who had little or no video game exposure during the previous six months. The participants were then randomly assigned to three groups: 1) A violent video game group in which participants were given a Playstation 3 console to play Grand Theft Auto V; 2) An active control group in which participants were given a Playstation 3 console to play The Sims 3, a video game deemed not to be violent; and a 3) passive control group in which participants were not given a console and were not told that they were an experimental control. Each participant in the Violent Video Game and Passive Control Groups was required to play their assigned video game for at least thirty minutes each day over a two-month period.

To analyze measures of aggression and pro-social behaviors, the researchers utilized questionnaires and behavioral tasks that had been used in previous research on the effects of video games. These tests were administered to the participants three times—before the experiment, directly after the two-month required-gaming period, and two months after the experiment. This study design worked to set a baseline in advance of the experiment and provided information on longer-term effects of video games via data collection two months after video gaming.

Data analysis entailed the collection of 52 different outcome variables across four tests and was tested at a 5-percent significance level. Accordingly, the researchers expected that as many as 10 analyses would be significant by chance. Further, as it is known that aggression and empathy are different between males and females and that the different sample groups had varying average age, the data results were controlled for sex and age.

The researchers found no negative effect of violent video gaming. Across the 208 different tests, the measures of difference in aggression, empathy, and other behaviors across sample groups and time only resulted in three significant results. Since 10 significant results were expected because of chance, the researchers substantiated their hypothesis—violent video games do not impact the attitudes of players.

This result provides significant social science evidence to counter narratives blaming violent actions on video games. While violent video games may have some impact in the immediate short-term, video gaming does not seem to impact the long-term aggressive behaviors and attitudes of adult players. However, as many concerns about violence and video games address the well-being of children and teens, a further study targeting younger people may be needed to confirm these results. Likewise, future studies should look to strengthen external validity of the results through analyses that look at differences across countries, length of study and the number of violent video games being played. In addition, as violent video game cultures permeate online communities, further research on the effects of video games should address how violent video gaming may impact the online behaviors of gamers.

Article source: Kühn, Simone, Dimitrij Tycho Kugler, Katharina Schmalen, Markus Weichenberger, Charlotte Witt, and Jürgen Gallinat. “Does Playing Violent Video Games Cause Aggression? A Longitudinal Intervention Study.” Molecular Psychiatry (2018).

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