Current studies
- American Psychological Association – “Video Games and Aggressive Thoughts, Feelings, and Behavior in the Laboratory and in Life” – http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/psp-784772.pdf
Anderson and Dill describe how the Columbine killers made their video footage of the school massacre emulate a modded version of Doom found on the web site of Eric Harris, one of the offenders. No mention is made of Harris’s other exposures, family environment or whether he and the other offender Dylan Klebold had a history of psychiatric disorders or other affecting variables. The sample size is 2. With no other information available, this cannot be taken as anecdotal evidence that video games corrupt teenagers.
As it turns out, child psychologist Peter Langman studied Harris, Klebold and 8 other students who murdered various individuals after Columbine. Harris was diagnosed with psychopathy, and Klebold was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Langman drew these conclusions based on 27,000 pages of notes taken on the teenagers after their arrest. For those of you uninitiated in psychiatry, one of the key differentiating diagnostic factors of paranoid schizophrenia vs other disorders is the presence of voices in the patient’s mind telling them what to do. In Norway where I live, such patients are normally admitted to a mental hospital and receive long-term care to help them recover from their illness.
Langman’s book on the subject can be found here:
However, the authors did in fact go on to do a reasonably plausible study. The sample size is rather small, it has not been repeated so cannot be given definitive credibility, and unfortunately the control group was only 9% of the sample size. These are major flaws, but I think this study represents one of the best and most thorough scientific surveys carried out to date, and could very well be used as a basis for other scientists to repeat on a much greater scale.
Anderson and Dill define a model of aggression they call GAAM. Their theoretical model takes environmental and psychological factors into account, and was tested in a number of studies, of which I’ll just mention the first here. This study used 227 psychology undergraduate gamers. They were asked to fill out questionnaires detailing how violent the games they play are on a scale of 1-7, the genres of each game and the time spent on each one on average. They found various results and I don’t want to misrepresent them so I recommend you read the article, but in brief summary they found that those with aggressive personalities as defined by the scales were more likely to be influenced by violent video games. However the most interesting finding was that time spent playing video games had a far more negative impact on delinquency and high school grades, whereas the correlation between exposure to violent games and delinquency and high school grades was statistically insignificant. Of course, this is a pretty obvious conclusion – kids shouldn’t be skipping school to play games. Is a sample size of 227 enough to be conclusive? Probably not, unfortunately.
There is also another key problem with this interview technique: the participants themselves are left to decide how violent the games they play are, and to report accurately how long they spend playing them. This is a trade-off: we cannot keep people in isolated bubbles for years, but we can’t entirely trust human memory and judgment either – which pushes the error rate up considerably and is an example of why multiple testing methods (vis-a-vis repeatability) are crucial.