No link between video games, violence

Christopher J. Ferguson

Friday, Jan. 11, 2013 | 2:01 a.m.

The December shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a national tragedy in which we all share. After such horrid events, it is natural to want do something, anything, to assert a sense of control over the uncontrollable. Unfortunately, such moments can lead us to do the wrong things, like blame video games.

There’s no evidence violent games contributed to the Sandy Hook shooting, but the correlation has been made.

Research on media violence has been inconclusive and suffered from serious methodological flaws. Recent reviews by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the governments of Australia and Sweden all reached the same conclusion.

The American Psychological Association declined to participate in the 2011 Supreme Court case on video games, citing inconsistencies in the literature. Most studies of media violence have historically employed weak and dubious measures of aggression. Those few that actually examine youth violence have generally found little evidence for concern.

During the past few decades in which video games have become more violent, youth violence declined to 40-year lows. Nations that consume more video games per capita than the U.S., such as the Netherlands or South Korea, have much less violent crime than we do. Put, simply, there is no good evidence to link media violence to societal violence, certainly not violent crime.

When events like Sandy Hook happen, as a society we tend to experience what psychologists call “confirmation bias.” If the perpetrator is a young man, it is often assumed video games contributed. But when a perpetrator doesn’t fit the stereotype, such as 62-year-old William Spengler, who killed two volunteer firemen in New York in December, media is not mentioned. Nobody bothers to point out that Spengler didn’t play video games.

This bias leads to the misperception that mass homicide perpetrators consumed lots of violent media, though a 2002 U.S. Secret Service report concluded they generally did not. This bias was displayed in 2007 when commentators such as television’s Dr. Phil concluded that video games were responsible for the Virginia Tech shooting. The official investigation later showed that the shooter was not a gamer, despite being a young man.

Given that Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook perpetrator, was a young man, and almost all young men play violent video games at least occasionally, it’s both easy and valueless to “link” crimes by young men to video games. In doing so, we fail to learn from past mistakes.

Back in the 1950s, the culprit for juvenile delinquency was comic books. Experts testified before Congress that Batman and Robin comics caused not only delinquency but homosexuality (the Caped Crusaders were secretly gay, it was claimed). We’ve seen similar claims about music — not just gangsta rap, but Elvis Presley, jazz and waltzes. Books, for centuries, have been blamed for societal ills.

During periods of media-based moral panics, politicians, activists and scholars will say irresponsible things that the data can’t support. These statements feed our fear and give us answers we so desperately want, even if those answers are false.

One might reasonably ask, even if the evidence does not support a link between violent media and societal violence, why take the chance? Why not restrict violent media just in case? The danger in this logic is that in focusing on the wrong issue, we distract society from more pressing issues such as mental health.

After the 1999 Columbine massacre, the country focused on video games. That led to a decade’s worth of useless legislation that cost millions of dollars and was ultimately struck down as unconstitutional. We’ve tried that path before.

It’s time to learn from the past and pick a new road.

Christopher J. Ferguson is an associate professor and chairman of the Department of Psychology and Communication at Texas A&M International University. He wrote this for the Hartford Courant.