NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam had a great spot on NPR’s Morning Edition today about the disputes among social scientists over the impact of violent video games on kids. [“It’s A Duel: How Do Violent Video Games Affect Kids?”] You won’t be surprised to hear I wholeheartedly agree with Texas A&M psychologist Chris Ferguson, who noted in the spot:
Ferguson says it’s easy to think senseless video game violence can lead to senseless violence in the real world. But he says that’s mixing up two separate things. “Many of the games do have morally objectionable material and I think that is where a lot of the debate on this issue went off the rails,” he said. “We kind of mistook our moral concerns about some of these video games, which are very valid — I find many of the games to be morally objectionable — and then assumed that what is morally objectionable is harmful.”
I’ve written about Ferguson’s work and these issues more generally many times over through the years here at the TLF. Here are some of the most relevant essays:
- Video Games, Media Violence & the Cathartic Effect Hypothesis
- More on Monkey See-Monkey Do Theories about Media Violence & Real-World Crime
- Video Games, Free Speech & the Lunacy of “Ecogenerism”
- Video Games and “Moral Panic”
- Video Games, Violence, & Social “Science”: Another Day, Another Fight
- Do video games create cop killers?
In these essays, I’ve tried to make a couple of key points about the social science literature on “media effects” theory: Continue reading →
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