The beauty of psychology research is that it can make you
think differently about things. A case
in point comes from the ongoing research on the influence of violent video
games on aggressive behavior.
I have written about this topic frequently in this blog over
the years.
The research to date generally shows that playing violent
video games increases aggression. There
are many ways to measure increases in aggression. Some studies use techniques where they give
people an opportunity to blast an opponent with noise. Brad Bushman and his colleagues have shown
that after people play violent video games, they are willing to blast people
with louder noises than when they played a nonviolent game.
Other studies look at how easy it is to think aggressive
thoughts. Studies like this use a lexical decision task. In lexical decision, you see a string of
letters and have to decide whether it is a word. If you saw the letters BRAIK, you would say
“no” it isn’t a word, but if you saw the letter BRAKE, you would say “yes” it
is a word. Lots of research shows that
when seeing letters that form a word, you are faster to respond when the
concept described by that word is easy for you to think about. That means that you would be faster to judge
that the letters FIST form a word when you are thinking about being aggressive
than when you are not.
In general, studies using these lexical decision tasks show
that you are faster to respond to words related to aggression after playing
violent video games than after playing nonviolent video games.
When I have written about these studies in the past, I have
gotten comments from a number of gamers who insist that playing violent video
games really does help them to vent their anger. That places people’s experience in opposition
to the data from studies.
A study by Markus Denzler, Michael Hafner and Jens Forster
in the December 2011 issue of Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin may help to explain what is going on.
They suggest that playing a violent video game may actually
help to decrease aggression if you play the game with the goal to vent your
anger.
In one study, participants were first asked to remember a
situation in which they were angry with someone else. If you try this yourself, you’ll realize that
thinking about something that made you angry can actually start to make you
angry again. After thinking about
something that made people angry, they were asked to do a lexical decision task
involving some words that were related to aggression (like FIST) and others
that were not related to aggression (like STOVE). As you might expect, people were faster to
respond to the words related to aggression than to the words not related to
aggression.
Next, everyone was given the chance to play a 4-minute video
game. The game was a simple first-person
shooter in which people had the chance to shoot at soldiers that appeared on
the screen. When a soldier was shot, a
blood spot appeared on the screen.
Half the participants just played the game. The other half were told to play the game in
order to vent their anger. After playing
the game, everyone did the lexical decision task again.
Consistent with the previous research, people who played the
game with no goal responded faster to words relating to aggression than to
words not relating to aggression. In
fact, playing the game made it easier for them to think about aggression than
when they first thought about being angry.
However, those people who played the game with the goal to
vent their anger seem to have succeeded.
It was actually harder for them to respond to the words related to
aggression than to the words not related to aggression.
The authors did a similar study looking at how people
typically deal with anger. They used a
scale that measures how often people try to vent their anger by doing something
aggressive like slamming a door. This
study also asked people to think about someone who made them angry and had them
play a violent video game. People who
typically try to vent their anger and played a game found it harder to respond
to words relating to aggression than those who don’t typically vent their anger
and played a game.
What does this mean?
This study suggests that if you have the goal to vent your
anger, then playing a violent video game can actually help you to achieve that
goal. However, if you play a video game
when angry without the goal to vent your anger, then playing the game helps you
to think about being aggressive.
There is, of course, another set of studies that needs to be
done here. These studies just looked at
how easily people could think about aggression.
It will be important to look at situations in which people can actually
act aggressively (like the noise task) to see whether making it harder to think
about aggression translates into less aggressive behavior in practice.
For now, though, this is a great example of research that
can make you think differently about a topic.
