With an increase in mass violence in the past couple of decades, after each crime people look for something to throw the blame on, and one of the most popular one in recent years has been violent video games.
An article published by the New York Times — “Video Games Aren’t Why Shootings Happen. Politicians Still Blame Them.” — described the reaction of multiple politicians following two mass shootings that occured over one weekend, one in El Paso, Texas and one in Dayton, Ohio in August 2019. A gunman came to a Walmart supercenter in El Paso and opened fire, killing 23 people and injuring 23 more. The following day, a man shot and killed nine people and injured 17 others outside a bar in Dayton. According to the article, following the two shootings many politicians, including President Donald Trump, lieutenant governor of Texas Dan Patrick, and Republican House minority leader Kevin McCarthy all commented on the notion that violent video games are the root of the problem for those who cause mass shootings. President Trump said, “We must stop the glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace.”
Another article in the New York Times described Walmart’s response to the El Paso shooting. Here the author explained that following the shooting Walmart announced that it would remove displays and images that depicted any kind of violent activity. This included things like not playing videos that depicted any kind of violence on their TVs and removing posters and advertisements for video games that showed violent activity in the games. Any content that displayed messages of violent or aggressive behavior was to be removed from stores.
However, both articles also pointed out that extensive research by psychologists has shown that there is not truly any evidence that shows a connection between playing violent video games and committing violent crimes.
Dr. Laura Stockdale has studied this idea as well. In her lecture (April 21, 2020), Dr. Laura Stockdale described the effects that violence in various forms of media had on development, including aggressive behavior, personality and cognition. She also discussed how just simple exposure to aggressive behavior could influence one’s own aggressive behavior. In particular she gave an example of Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment, which showed that children who observed the aggressive behavior of other people could learn to be more aggressive themselves. She further explained how exposure to media violence could affect prosocial behavior, empathy, attitudes and more.
The article, “Emotionally anesthetized: media violence induces neural changes during emotional face processing,” described Stockdale’s study which was “designed to examine the influence of short-term exposure to film violence on emotional face processing.” Stockdale (et al.) used electroencephalography to examine the connection between exposure to media violence and neural changes which were associated with emotional processing. The main results of this study showed that exposure to media violence was associated with “emotional anesthetization,” or a reduction in the cognitive ability to process emotions in facial expressions. Similarly, these results showed that exposure to media violence can change the way humans view other people’s faces. Overall, the results of this study were consistent with the results of previous research that showed that being exposed to violence in the media (whether that was video games, film, etc.) was associated with an increase in aggressive behavior and a decrease in prosocial behavior. It also corresponded with previous research that showed desensitization to emotion.
Although the results of this study may seem like they support the false claims that playing video games is associated with committing violent crimes, there is an important distinction to make. Aggressive behavior and criminal behavior are very different. Although observing aggression in video games might make people behave more aggressively or might make them emotionally desensitized to the aggressive behavior of others, does not mean it will make them more likely to commit violent crimes. There has been no evidence linking media violence to criminal activity, so to place the blame on that — rather than trying to decrease mass violence with increased regulation and policy —is wrong and, in my opinion, irresponsible.
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