Violence and Video Games: Douglas Gentile
Violence and Video Games: Douglas Gentile
1. How did you become interested in psychology?
>> I have very bad reasons for being in psychology. One is my father was a psychologist, and growing up I didn't know that, but when I finally took Psychology 101 at my university and we got to the behavior modification techniques, for every single one I had a personal anecdote of how it had been used on me. So I got it; it came easily to me. And the other bad reason is because one of the first psychology courses I took was from a woman whom I found gorgeous, and so I just sat there every day going, "aaaah," and classically conditioned myself to have very warm feelings about psychology.
2. What is your current area of research?
>> I study media's effects on children and adults, all different types of media's effects. I do a lot on media violence and with violent video games, but I also study, say beer ads and youth drinking, or how the media portrays psychologists and how that might effect statements about mental health -- any issue about how the media might affect people.
3. How do you define “violence” versus “media violence?”
>> We define violence in the media or even between people, aggression, as behavior that is intended to cause harm to a person who would be motivated to not be harmed. So, tornados would not count as violence, even though they are colloquially a violent act, there's no intention to harm. And so when we're talking about television violence or video game violence, it would be shows in which you either intend to, you know, shoot the other character in the game or you can guess that that's what the intention of the character on the show or movie was intending, that they were intending to harm that person.
4. Describe the effects of media violence on aggression in children and young adults.
>> There are several effects of media violence on childhood aggression. There are at least 14 documented effects. And they can be grouped together in certain ways. And one way that I think about them is that there are four many effects. The first one's called the aggressor effect. And the idea is that the more entertainment violence a kid watches, the more he or she becomes more aggressive, starts to think more aggressive thoughts, ultimately behave more aggressively. The second effect is called the victim effect. And the idea here is that, the more media violence you consume, the more scared you get; the more you start seeing the world as a scary place where bad things happen; and you start initiating more self-protective behaviors like carrying guns to school which, ironically, increases children's odds of being shot. The third effect is called the bystander effect. And the idea here is that, the more you watch, the more desensitized you become. Now, I don't just mean desensitized to other media violence, although that's true. It also desensitizes us to aggression in the real world. An example is there was a study done with college-age men who were randomly assigned. Half of them saw a sports program 20 minutes; the other half saw a movie that included a simulated rape scene. And, after seeing it, they brought in a woman who allegedly really had been raped. And the men who saw the movie with the simulated rape scene were much more callous towards her, much less empathetic, much less sympathetic, much more apathetic to her real human suffering and pain. So 20 minutes of a program changed how they interacted with a real human being. And the fourth main effect is the appetite effect. Simply put, the more you watch, the more you want to watch. And these aren't debated anymore in psychology, for the most part. They're debated outside of psychology. But we now know everyone is affected. The question is: Which way are you most likely to be affected? And that's where the state of the art now is, is who's most likely to be affected in which way rather than is there an effect.
5. What questions do you hope to answer with your research?
>> I'm interested in some of my research in looking at the effects that violent video games have on children and how large of an effect is it, is it something we really need to be concerned about, how concerned is it -- a larger effect than the effect of television and movie violence. And there's little evidence that does seem to suggest that it may be a larger effect. And that makes sense, you're interacting with it, you're an active learner in the aggression rather than just a passive observer. Other questions are, answering the question about, are kids who are more aggressive, naturally aggressive and hostile, are they seeking out violent media, or does the media violence cause them to become more aggressive. And the answer there seems to be both are correct, that of course more aggressive children do seek out more violent media. But then that seems to change them and they become more aggressive. So it's a vicious cycle.
6. Describe your findings on the validity of current media ratings.
>> We had created a rating scale that we validated nationally by sending videotapes of television shows and video games out to parents, and made sure that they agreed with what our rating system said. And they did. And then we compared the move ratings and the television ratings and the video game ratings to what we now knew was a valid measure. And unfortunately, the industry ratings are not nearly as reliable or valid as we would hope them to be. The only ratings that parents seem to always agree with are the most restrictive. If a movie's given an R or a TV's given an M for mature or television, TV, MA for mature, those ones, parents agree 100% of those products really aren't for kids. They tend to agree at a lesser rate with shows that are given the least restrictive rating -- G or TV-7, Y-7, or various young child ratings. Where there seems to be the most disagreement is in those middle ages, the teen rating for video games or the TV-14. For example, with the TV-14 rating, only 14% of shows with a TV-14 rating did parents think were totally fine for teenagers. So even if parents are using the ratings very thoughtfully, a lot of the time their kids are exposed to things the parents didn't expect were going to be in those shows or games.
7. Are there particular traits or other risk factors that make some children more susceptible to becoming aggressive?
>> Here's another surprise. We used to believe -- and many people still believe -- that boys are more affected. Many people still believe that perhaps younger children are more affected than say college-age students or adults. We used to believe that only the already aggressive kids were affected. I can't find any of those. Yes, girls are less likely to get into fights, and girls are less likely to play violent video games. But the girls who do play a lot of violent video games get into fights just as much as the boys. The highly aggressive kids to begin with, do become more aggressive, but so do the non-aggressive kids. In fact, it's an almost 10 times increase in the risk of getting into fights for the least naturally aggressive kids if they play a lot of violent video games than if they don't. So no one is unaffected by it. And the way I tend to think about this is that media violence is just one risk factor, among many risk factors. There are dozens of risk factors for aggression -- it's not the biggest, it's also not the smallest. And for someone to be aggressive, any one risk factor, just being a boy, isn't enough to have you really act aggressively. But when you start adding a couple of these risk factors up -- you're a boy who has previously been involved in fights and you play a lot of violent video games -- now the risk of your getting into aggressive situations goes up greatly. And that seems -- the media violence seems to add that amount of risk, regardless of what other characteristics you already come in with. Now, one of the reasons we may think that some people are more affected than others is because some people are closer to the threshold of being aggressive, so that little bit of media violence pushes them over. But for a girl who's got involved parents, gets good grades in school, it raises her that much but she's nowhere near likely to hit someone. You need multiple risk factors and the more extreme the aggression -- like school shootings -- those kids have to have many risk factors. People often talk about media violence being responsible for Columbine. And of course it's not. But those kids had all sorts of other risk factors. They had uninvolved parents, they had psychiatric illnesses, they had been bullied. These are all things we know lead to greater aggression. They also played a lot of violent video games and watched a lot of violent movies. Was that the straw that broke that camel's back? I doubt it, but I do know that if they hadn't, that would have reduced their risk. And so the difference between media violence and all the other risk factors for aggression is, it's the one that's easily controlled. Poverty is a risk factor for aggression, but you can't tell a family in poverty, get out of poverty, you're putting your kids at risk. They know that, and if they could they would. But even that family with very limited means can still say, no, you can't play this game, play this one instead. No, you can't watch this show, watch this one instead. And so that's what makes it a different type of risk factor from the other risk factors for aggression.
8. What research findings are most surprising to you?
>> We did a study, a short-term longitudinal study, with 430 3rd through 5th grade children, and we measured them early in the school year and late in the school year -- about 6 months between. And we measured how much media violence they were consuming, TV, movies and video games. And we asked their peers who are the aggressive kids in class, and we asked the teachers as well to rate all of the children's' aggressive and prosocial behaviors. And what we found is that the kids who are consuming the most media violence early in the school year have actually changed to become more aggressive just 5 or 6 months later. And I was shocked by this, because I didn't expect we could see a change in that short of time. I think that no one game matters, no one show matters, no one movie matters, the same way no one cigarette matters. What matters is smoking a number of cigarettes over many years. And I think that's the way media violence has an effect, is the accumulation over many years. But in fact, we were able to show that even controlling for how aggressive they were at time one, just 6 months later, they had changed to become more aggressive as rated by their peers and teachers, which is really surprising because the peers and teachers don't know what they're watching at home. But they can see the difference in behavior in the classroom. Another study that gave me very surprising results was I did a study with laparoscopic surgeons. And a baroscopic surgeon is a type of surgeon who doesn't have her hands inside you but has a camera inside you, and then instruments that are on long sticks. And the surgeon is looking at a video screen, and not at the patient and manipulating the instruments from outside the patient's body. It's also called minimally invasive surgery. And what we found is that surgeons who played at least 3 hours of video games per week in the past or who were better at playing video games were also much better at advanced surgical skills. In fact, it was a better predictor of their surgical skill than how many years of medical training they've had and how many surgeries they've actually performed. So surgeons who had played at least 3 hours of video games in the past were not only faster at their techniques, but they were better. And in surgery those often don't go together, that the faster you go, perhaps you'll make more errors. But in fact, playing video games seemed to have helped train these surgeons to be better at getting information off of his screen and doing it much more accurately and quickly.
9. What are the implications of your research for parents?
>> The main implication is that parents really need to pay attention, that in fact the effect is much more powerful than any of us want to give it credit for, that advertisements do affect us, even though we don't usually feel affected. And when you ask parents, how many of you believe media violence affects children a lot, all the hands go up. And when they say, how many of you think media violence affects your children, they'll come right back down. Or you can do this with students themselves, and you ask them, how many of you think it affects, advertisements affect people a lot? And they all go up. How many of you think they affect you a lot? And they all come right back down. So we don't notice when we've been influenced by them. We can't tell. And in fact, many media are designed to have an effect on us without your conscious awareness. That's the way advertising works, for example. It's done in a way that you're not supposed to notice you're being influenced, or you might fight it. And so we can't tell when we're being affected, and we actually don't want to believe we're affected. And so main implication is, just because you don't notice it doesn't mean it's not happening, and you should stop pretending that it doesn't affect you and your kids and start saying, it must be influencing us. We wouldn't spend so many billions of dollars a year on advertising if it didn't work. It must work, even though we don't notice it working. And that's the same thing with media violence, it will over time, make the average kid who consumes it more aggressive. You won't notice your kid getting more aggressive because you also don't notice your kid growing taller. It takes a person who only sees the kid once a year, your grandparents, oh, my goodness, how much you've grown. It's the same thing with this, that the effects are subtle, they're slow, and humans are not very good at noticing small, subtle changes over time.
10. Where do you see your research heading in the future?
>> I am doing more research on media violence and looking at how violent video games and violent movies and violent television may actually together be a bigger risk factor than any one of those alone, and how that may interact with other risk factors. We have a couple longitudinal studies, longer term starting up now, that will look at the development of aggressive personality over time. I'm looking at what is colloquially being called video game addiction, or computer addiction. I am interested in the positive uses of the media. I have a study starting on looking at how educational video games may teach even preschoolers important school readiness skills like reading skills and numeracy skills.
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