In August 2013, an eight year old boy shot his grandmother with her own gun after playing the game Grand Theft Auto. He was not charged. He was not charged and it was declared an accident in the US town of Louisiana.
If we are part of the baby boomer generation, most of us would have spent our time climbing trees, reading books, watching much less TV (than today) and playing games than our counterparts in this generation. Generation Y and their children have spent more time cumulatively watching television and playing violent media games today than children of generation X according to various reports, According to the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science, new research suggests that teens who play violent video games will likely become desensitized to violence and lose their sense of moral restraint. In an entire lifetime, all of us are now likely to have watched ten year’s worth of TV, just imagine how much video game playing our children are spending and perhaps on violent games?
This view has long been held by those who have studied media effects in communications studies and who accept Harold Laswell’s famous media effects model which suggests that those who create media do so deliberately with some effect in mind. He has suggested that there is a correlation between violence and violent media and said that such desensitization is known as the “hypodermic needle effect”. This suggests that what we watch, we invariably “become”. However Laswell had his detractors.
Brad Bushman, professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University and co-author of the study, said, “We have consistently found in a number of studies that those who play violent games act more aggressively, and this is just more evidence.”
A team of researchers analysed 172 school children in Italy between the ages of 13-19 years old. According to the reports, for the first experiment, participants were required to play either a non-violent video game (Pinball 3D or MiniGolf 3D), or a violent video game (Grand Theft Auto III or Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas). A bowl containing chocolate was also placed next to the computers during the research. The purpose of the study was to determine how playing these games affected their personalities. At the same time, the researchers informed the students that it was not healthy to consume so much chocolate in such a short space of time.
Bushman also said “very few teens were unaffected by violent video games, but this study helps us address the question of who is most likely to be affected. Those who are most morally disengaged are likely to be the ones who show less self-restraint after playing.”
There were a number of interesting finding:
- Children who fought on video used louder and louder noises to blast their “non-existent” opponents.
- The students at three times more chocolate than those who played non-violent games.
- The teenagers who played violent video games cheat eight times more than those who did not play non-violent games.
In fighting “unseen” or non-existent gaming partner in another test, the student who was most aggressive in his fighting was awarded with the ability to blast an opponent. Reports suggest that the blast was so loud as to be heard above earphones. The more aggressive the player in general, the louder the explosive combatant blast, researchers said.
Moral Disengagement Scale.
Using this scale measures the researchers were able to determine the extent to which they held themselves to higher standards. This, in ways, debunks Laswell’s hypodermic needle effect in that the study revealed that those with less moral turpitude were more likely to be affected negatively by the playing of media games.
According to reports, a question was posed to the participants: “Compared to the illegal things people do, taking some things from a store without paying for them is not very serious.”
The higher the participants scored, the more they were morally disengaged, the report indicated.
According to the report, the study showed that both males and females responded the same way but that more males were likely to react negatively (morally) in playing violent video games. The girls, however, ate more chocolate.
“But even girls were more likely to eat extra chocolate and to cheat and to act aggressively when they played Grand Theft Auto versus the mini golf or pinball game,” Bushman adds. “They didn’t reach the level of the boys in the study, but their behavior did change.”
