Study: Limited Relation Between Violent Video Games and Real World Violence Attitudes

A new study has surfaced which finds a limited correlation between the level of violence included in the video games that a group of children play and the viewpoints that they hold when it comes to issues of real-world violence.

Gamasutra has obtained a copy of a new study which will be published in the Journal of Children and Media which was conducted by professor Edward Vieira from Simmons University and by Wake Forest professor Marina Krcmar.

They have surveyed 166 children with ages between 7 and 15, all of them coming from schools in the greater Boston area.

The exposure that all the children have had to violent video games has been evaluated by multiplying the number of hours they spend gaming during one week with a multiplier which takes into account the ratings of the titles they enjoyed as given out by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board.

They obtained a “dangerous play score” and then asked the students to answer a number of questions that evaluate the development of their moral reasoning, focusing on the sympathy they had for victims of violence and their ability to take in the perspective of others.

By using the two, the team behind the study has found that a higher violence score had “a small significant positive effect” of something called “justified violence,” which the professors describe as actions that are morally correct but require the application of force.

A lot of violent games are “associated with a decreasing ability to sympathize with others” and this in turn made some unjustified violence as more acceptable.

Violent gaming did not in any way change a student’s ability to take on the perspective of others.

The authors of the study themselves acknowledge that the study is far from definitive because of the small sample sizer, because of the moral reasoning models and their limited reliability and because of the limits of the method for evaluating the violence level of the games played.