Ohio State University
News Release
Originally released on December 10, 2012
A new study provides the first experimental evidence that the negative effects of playing violent video games can accumulate over time.
Researchers found that people who played a violent video game for three consecutive days showed increases in aggressive behavior and hostile expectations each day they played. Meanwhile, those who played nonviolent games showed no meaningful changes in aggression or hostile expectations over that period.
Although other experimental studies have shown that a single session of playing a violent video game increased short-term aggression, this is the first to show longer-term effects, said Brad Bushman, co-author of the study and professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University.
“It’s important to know the long-term causal effects of violent video games, because so many young people regularly play these games,” Bushman said.
“Playing video games could be compared to smoking cigarettes. A single cigarette won’t cause lung cancer, but smoking over weeks or months or years greatly increases the risk. In the same way, repeated exposure to violent video games may have a cumulative effect on aggression.”
Bushman conducted the study with Youssef Hasan and Laurent Bègue of the University Pierre Mendès-France, in Grenoble, France, and Michael Scharkow of the University of Hohenheim in Germany.
Their results are published online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and will appear in a future print edition.
The study involved 70 French university students who were told they would be participating in a three-day study of the effects of brightness of video games on visual perception.
They were then assigned to play a violent or nonviolent video game for 20 minutes on each of three consecutive days.
Those assigned the violent games played Condemned 2, Call of Duty 4 and then The Club on consecutive days (in a random order). Those assigned the nonviolent games played S3K Superbike, Dirt2 and Pure (in a random order).
After playing the game each day, participants took part in an exercise that measured their hostile expectations. They were given the beginning of a story, and then asked to list 20 things that the main character will do or say as the story unfolds. For example, in one story another driver crashes into the back of the main character’s car, causing significant damage. The researchers counted how many times the participants listed violent or aggressive actions and words that might occur.
The press release is here.
