Games, films and the rise of violence 15.11.2014

Discussions about whether video games and films with bloody content provoke aggressive behavior began in the 20s of the last century. Then, of course, there were no video games yet, but there were films, and newspapers with criminal chronicles, too, and here they are, according to many, could undermine moral foundations and "worsen the criminogenic situation." And with each new shooting incident in a school, store, on the street, such discussions revive, and proposals appear to limit the sale of shooting games, to prohibit children from watching films with violent scenes, etc. On the one hand, everything here seems logical: a person would never have thought of going to shoot at people in a store or school, but he played a game (or watched a movie) - and decided to continue in reality.

However, if we turn to psychological research on this topic, then not everything is so simple. Christopher Ferguson of the Stetson University (USA) published an article in the Journal of Communication describing the results of two studies: one analyzed the relationship between film violence and murder rates from 1920 to 2005, the second did the same for video games between 1996 and 2011. Briefly about the results obtained writes MedicalXpress.

In the first case, independent viewers assessed the degree of aggressiveness in popular films, considering both the frequency of bad episodes and their expressiveness. Cinematic aggressiveness was compared with the number of murders. As a result, it turned out that there is no correlation between these two indicators in general. Only in the middle of the 90th century was there some “consent” between the level of cruelty in popular cinema and the level of violence in life, but after the 40th year, the relationship suddenly became reversed, that is, cruelty in films grew, and murders became less and less. (Similarly, real life ignored movie brutality until the XNUMXs.) In other words, if there was a coincidence between the two, it has passed.

With games, the situation turned out to be the following: the statistics spoke more about the discrepancy between the level of cruelty in games and the level of domestic violence by young people. However, the correlation was too weak to be able to talk about it at all, in any direction.

The difference between the described works is that often the connection between violence in the media (from films to video games) and violence "in real life" is studied in laboratory experiments: a person, under the supervision of specialists, played something cruel, or watched something like that, and then his level of cruelty was measured using psychological tests. But is it necessary to say that real life is very different from laboratory conditions, and in psychology this is felt like nowhere else? Here, for comparison, just taken "life" statistics. In general, various correlations were found here, both in a positive and negative direction, but they appeared only for a short period of time. In the long run, the links between violence in the media and violence in life disappeared. We emphasize that we are not talking about the fact that virtual violence somehow stimulates or weakens real violence, but that nothing can be said about the level of virtual violence about real violence.

Besides, even if there were an obvious correlation, we would still have to decide what is the cause and what is the effect. Those who are convinced that it is the growth of violence in games that stimulates the growth of violence in life can be answered that the opposite is true, that games and films are only a mirror of real aggressiveness in society. Research of this kind inevitably invites accusations of bias, but let us ask ourselves: are there any attempts in the fight against media cruelty to simply get away from the problem, assigning something the most obvious, something that is so easy to fight as the root of all evil? You can, of course, forget about all sorts of experiments and statistics altogether, but the temptation of the scientific method, fortunately, is great enough that psychologists continue to be disturbed for a variety of reasons - including violence on the screen.