Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
Greta Munger is Associate Professor of Psychology at Davidson College whose works include The History of Psychology: Fundamental Questions. Dave Munger is a writer whose works include Researching Online and The Pocket Reader. And yes, he is married to Greta.
If you're older than about 20, you'll probably recognize the image to the left from an anti-drug campaign from the 1980s. The image was supposed to represent the effects of drugs on the human brain. While the effectiveness of the campaign is debatable, the fact that it now seems a quaint relic of a bygone era begs the question: are we repeating the same mistakes in the war on violent video games?
While there are many correlational studies and even some experiments showing the relationship between playing violent video games and aggressive behavior, there have been comparatively few neurological studies of violent games.
It's well established that playing violent games is associated with aggressive behavior, but it's difficult to determine whether violent games cause aggression. After all, people who are predisposed to aggressive behavior might seek out violent games. But a team led by René Weber did realize that a neurological study could provide another link between violent games and aggression.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is an ethical conundrum that's been used for years by psychologists, economists, and philosophers to explore human behavior. The basic scenario is this: two criminals have been captured and placed in separate cells. Neither prisoner is allowed to talk to the other, and the interrogators don't have enough evidence to prosecute either one. If prisoner A confesses and prisoner B doesn't, then prisoner A is released and prisoner B gets punished. If both confess, then both will get a lighter sentence. If neither confesses, then both will be released. For each prisoner, confessing guarantees a lighter sentence and opens the possibility of release, but also damns the other prisoner to certain punishment. If both prisoners trust each other, neither should confess, so ultimately the scenario is a measure of trust.
We've reported on a variety of different studies looking video games and various measures of aggression (you can check out our "Video Games / Technology" category, and our archives) and a fairly common reaction, often coming from an avid gamer, is that this simply isn't true about him. Now one of the serious complications of doing psychological research is that our intuitions about how, or even what, we are doing can be dramatically wrong--this is why psychologists started doing experiments some one hundred and twenty odd years ago. You cannot refute a careful experiment with a personal declaratory statement, but you can turn a personal insight into a new experimental question: What aspect of personality might lead to different reactions in the face of aggressive and violent situations?
Brian Meier, Michael Robinson and Benjamin Wilkowski thought the personality factor of agreeableness might be playing a role in how individuals react to aggression-related cues. You know who agreeable people are--they are the ones who warm and friendly, and seem to be able to diffuse tense situations by bringing up helpful ideas.
My son Jim's favorite game, World of Warcraft, only works on my computer, which usually resides in the kitchen. Inevitably, Jim's often playing his game while Greta and I are making dinner, and I have to say, the most annoying thing about the game isn't the violence or the sound effects -- it's the background music. We're constantly asking him to turn the volume down so we don't have to listen to that dull, repetitive music.
So don't gamers find music annoying, too? I know when I'm indulging in my one guilty pleasure -- computer golf -- the room must be absolutely silent. Music is the worst, because rather than hitting the ball according to the rhythm of the swing, I tend to lapse into the rhythm of the music, and instead of heading straight down the fairway on the Chateau Whistler course, my ball ends up careening off course into a field of neck-high nettles, or ricocheting off a pine tree and into a pristine mountain brook.
Indeed, in at least one instance (a racing game studied by M. Yamada in 2001), researchers found a negative correlation between certain types of music and performance on the game. But in both this case and my anecdotal example of playing video golf, we're talking about music that's not specifically designed to accompany a game.
Much of the research on violent video games, like a vast proportion of all psychological research, has focused on college students. This shouldn't be surprising, since most college psychology departments require students to participate in experiments as a part of the Introduction to Psychology course. It's an easy way for researchers to find human participants, and a great way for students to learn how real research is done. Research results for college students often are equivalent to the population as a whole, and even when they aren't, college students can establish a baseline to compare to other groups.
But the group people are most concerned about when it comes to the effect of violent games is probably early adolescent boys, much younger than the typical college student. What if younger people respond differently to games? Unfortunately, there hasn't been much research on this age group, but Steven J. Kirsh has taken an innovate approach to predicting how the impact of violent games differs for younger adolescents. Kirsh has used more general research on aggression in adolescents to formulate several hypotheses on how violent games might fit in to those models.
Kids love robots. I have a three-year-old friend who can identify the 1950s cult icon Robbie the Robot at 20 paces. My own son Jim could do an impressive multi-voiced impression of R2D2 by age five. Now that real robots are beginning to be everyday household items (when I was a kid, if I'd known I'd be able to buy a vacuum-cleaner robot from Sears when I was a grown-up, I'd be ashamed to learn that I never actually bought one!), one wonders how real kids will respond to them.
When, for example, might a child begin to believe that a robot has a conscious mind, and that humans might communicate with robots the same way they talk with each other? The photo above (source: IRC) depicts a child interacting with Robovie, a robot designed to make human gestures, speak natural languages, and establish eye contact, just like real people. Perhaps these interactive features are the key, but perhaps a mere humanoid shape is all that is necessary to convince a child that something is "human."
A team led by Akiko Arita developed a test to see how 10-month-old infants reacted to the Robovie. They showed these babies a movie of a person talking with the robot. Some babies saw the robot responding and interacting in a natural human way, another group saw a human talking to an unresponsive robot, and a third group saw the robot interacting with an unresponsive human. Next, They were shown movies of a human talking to someone hidden behind a curtain. The curtain was removed and either a robot or a human was revealed.
Most research with infants is conducted in a similar manner: since babies can't tell us what surprises or interests them, researchers show them a stimulus of some type, then measure how long they look at the stimulus. The longer the stimulus keeps their attention, the more surprising it's surmised to be. In this case, the researchers measured how long babies looked at the newly revealed robot. Here are the results:
When babies had seen the robot interacting with the human previously, they appeared to be equally interested in a human-human conversation and a human-robot conversation later. But when the babies initially saw the human talking with an immobile robot, they looked at the hidden robot significantly longer than the hidden human. It appears that they were surprised to see another human trying to talk with it later. Perhaps more surprisingly, when the robot had tried to interact with an unresponsive human in the movie, babies again appeared to be surprised when a human tried to talk with a robot later.
So even as early as 10 months of age—well before they are able to talk themselves—it seems that infants consider interactivity to be the key factor in deciding whether a robot is something to talk to, whether it has a human mind. Perhaps it's no wonder, then, that this was my son's reaction to the scene in Star Wars when Luke and Han were awarded medals for destroying the Death Star: "Why didn't R2D2 get a medal, too?"
Arita, A., Hiraki, K., Kanda, T., & Ishiguro, H. (2005). Can we talk to robots? Ten-month-old infants expected humanoid robots to be talked to by humans. Cognition, 95, B49-B57.
There is little doubt that the cognitive demands of conversation can affect our awareness of the world around us. Everyone has a story of a near-miss collision with some clueless airhead driving who was jabbering away on the cell phone. A co-worker once tearfully told me of the time she was in an argument with her boyfriend while parked in his car at the side of the road. Furious, he got out of the car and slammed the door. He never noticed the passing car that hit him and instantly killed him. Was this a freak accident, or does conversation—and not just cell phone conversation—impair our ability to drive and assess the traffic around us?
Although there is a growing consensus that talking on cell phones—even hands-free phones—is a distraction that impairs driving ability (we've reported on one study by David Strayer and William Johnson confirming this notion), many researchers have suggested that in-person conversation may not have the same effect, because passengers can see the traffic patterns and slow the conversation when a difficult driving situation arises. A group led by Leo Gugerty designed two experiments to try to determine if car passengers adapted their conversation for tough driving situations.
Gugerty's team used a simple driving simulator for their task (you can see it here—it's more sophisticated than what Strayer and Johnson used, but still not exactly a realistic reproduction of real driving). In their first experiment, the team used the same task as Strayer and Johnson: the "passenger" gives the driver a word, then the driver must repeat a new word that begins with the last letter of the original word. But instead of simply navigating a path, drivers had to perform several tasks designed to replicate real driving, like remembering the locations of other vehicles, avoiding crashes, detecting hazards, or remembering when vehicles were in the car's blind spot. In a second version of the task, designed to approximate talking on a hands-free phone, the conversants were placed in adjacent cubicles where they could not see the driving similator. Drivers were also tested with no conversation. To motivate them to try their best, driver-passenger teams were told that the best two teams would receive a $25 reward.
Gugerty et. al did not find a significant difference between driving performance with on-board passengers and remote conversants—in both cases, driving was significantly worse than with no conversation. What's more, passengers did not slow the conversation during hazardous driving situations—in fact, the in-car conversation was faster than the remote conversation.
But perhaps the research participants simply felt that the verbal task was more important than the driving task, and so neglected the driving task. In a second experiment, the research team decided to try giving separate rewards for driving and conversing: each team could earn up to $3.75 for good driving, and up to $3 for good performance on the verbal task. They also made the verbal task more difficult for drivers: the passengers simply read words off a computer screen, and only the drivers had to generate new words. Since passengers never had to think of new words, the drivers would have to respond more frequently. As before, researchers found no difference between in-person and remote conversations: passengers did not slow their conversations to help the driver, even in difficult driving situations.
But with this second, more difficult verbal task, drivers performed even worse: here's a graph comparing the first experiment (easy verbal task) with the second (hard verbal task):
The decrement of the harder verbal task was largest for crash avoidance, cars recalled, and reaction time—hardly insignificant aspects of driving ability.
The authors are careful to point out that their task is by no means an accurate model of real driving, or real conversation. Participants tended to get into a rhythm in the verbal tasks, and this rhythm seemed to guide the pace of talking much more than the driving situation. Perhaps real conversation, especially with real passengers, is more adaptive to driving situations.
On the other hand, as my co-worker's tragic example demonstrates, sometimes conversations can seem more important than the driving situation. It's not difficult to imagine other such conversations: what if a lawyer is negotiating a multi-million-dollar contract on a cell phone? Would she give precedence to that conversation, or the more mundane task of merging onto the interstate? Gugerty et al.'s research is a strong reminder that the substantive demands of conversation are a significant drain on cognitive resources. There are some situations where we may not be able to trust ourselves not to talk, even when our own lives are at stake.
Gugerty, L., Rakauskas, M., & Brooks, J. (2004). Effects of remote and in-person verbal interactions on verbalization rates and attention to dynamic spatial scenes. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 36(6), 1029-43.
We learned from Alas, a Blog that Henry Jenkins has written an essay for PBS about video games, making the case that the public doesn't understand what the games are all about. Normally articles here on Cognitive Daily only report on peer-reviewed research, but in this case, we felt it was important to make an exception. We feel that Jenkins makes some misleading statements in his essay, and we'd like to take this opportunity to point our readers to some research showing why this is so.
Most bloggers and web designers will find this sort of chart familiar—it's a record of Cognitive Daily's visitor statistics for the month of November. The first graph records the amount of traffic we received each day. Notice that the pink bars are shorter—these correspond to the weekends. You might think that weekend traffic is lower just because we don't post new articles on weekends. But we didn't post an article at all on November 14, a Monday, yet still saw an increase in traffic compared to the day before. The second graph charts a number of indicators of traffic based on hour of the day (U.S. Central time). Here you'll notice that our busiest hours are right smack in the middle of the U.S. workday (over 75 percent of our traffic comes from the U.S.).
It's no leap of faith to suggest that many, if not most, readers of Cognitive Daily are doing it at work. This is not to say our readers don't have legitimate, work-related reasons for visiting this site. They may be psychology teachers. Or they may simply be seeking information for their employers: for example, employers might want to know that 64 percent of corporations in a recent survey have disciplined employees for inappropriate use of the internet at work. However, the site statistics on my personal blog follow a similar pattern. I have a hard time imagining an employer that would want its employees to read about my video game marathon with my son or my hike with my daughter, on company time.
One survey of employee internet use indicates that nearly 15 percent of workers surf the internet "constantly" while at work, and over 27 percent use active measures to conceal their surfing habits from their bosses.
One caution about the vault.com study—unlike the other studies we cover on Cognitive Daily, this one does not appear to be peer-reviewed. So what does peer-reviewed research have to say about the subject? In a 2004 descriptive article, Kimberly Young documented the phenomenon of internet addiction. She bases her definition of internet addiction on models for gambling addiction. Internet users are asked the following eight questions:
Do you feel preeoccupied with the internet (think about online activity or anticipate the next online session)?
Do you feel the need to use the internet with increasing amounts of time to achieve satisfaction?
Have you repeatedly made unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop internet use?
Do you feel restless, moody, depressed, or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop internet use?
Do you stay online longer than intended?
Have you jeopardized or risked the loss of a significant relationship, job, educational or career opportunity because of the internet?
Have you lied to family members, therapists, or others to conceal the extent of involvement with the internet?
Do you use the internet as a way of escaping from problems or of relieving a dysphoric mood (e.g. feelings of helplessness, guilt, anxiety, depression)?
Using a similar model, Louis Leung surveyed 699 Net-geners (members of the generation born between 1977 and 1997 who grew up in a world dominated by computers and electronic communication) in 2001 in Hong Kong and found that 37.9 percent met the criteria for internet addiction.
So what's special about these internet addicts? Perhaps surprisingly, they don't spend a lot more time online than non-addicted Net-geners: 34.8 hours a week compared to 27.1 for the non-addicted. They don't use the internet more than average Net-geners for commercial activity, seeking information, or social interactions such as online forums, games, or bulletin boards. The only significant correlation between internet addiction and a particular online activity in this group was use of ICQ (generally called IM—Instant Messaging—in the U.S.), and even that was a relatively moderate correlation of β = 0.13.
But some other general patterns about internet addiction emerged from Leung's study. Internet addicts tended to be female students, in contrast to previous studies finding that most problem computer use was among socially unskilled males—the traditional "computer geek." There were few socioeconomic differences between addicts and non-addicts, and Leung believes that as internet availability becomes more widespread, whatever small differences that remain will disappear.
Finally, and perhaps most critically, there was no difference in experience using the internet between addicts and non-addicts: addicted users averaged 2.64 years online, compared to 2.75 years for non-addicts. It seems that the critical dimension of addicted versus non-addicted behavior is the ability to control one's use of the internet.
Kimberly Young points out that there are several factors which make internet addiction difficult to treat. Employers and schools often encourage internet use, even to the point of integrating it into business and curriculum procedures. This makes addiction difficult to identify, and potentially legally problematic for businesses who are providing the very item their addicted employees crave. The newness of the disorder makes it difficult both for victims to be taken seriously, and for practicable treatments to be created.
In reading through the research, I've identified another problem: the technologies that researchers are trying to study are progressing so quickly that they often have changed or ceased to exist by the time of publication. Leung writes extensively on ICQ and bulletin boards, which have now virtually vanished from the online landscape, even though the article was published in late 2004. Young's 2004 article cites data on online use dating from the late 1990s—an eternity ago in internet time. Today, we want to know about the impact of MMORPGs and podcasts, but in the several years it takes to carry out a peer-reviewed experiment on the subject, these technologies may have morphed into something else entirely. In the meantime, there's little doubt that addictive online behavior will continue to be a problem, so continuing research on the issue, no matter the difficulties, is essential.
Leung, L. (2004). Net-generation attributes and seductive properties of the internet as predictors of online activities and internet addiction. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 7(3), 333-348.
Young, K.S. (2004). Internet addiction: A new clinical phenomenon and its consequences. The American Behavioral Scientist, 48(1), 402-415.
Carmageddon 2 (source: Gamespot) is a gory racing game where players control drivers with names like "Max Damage" as they tear through city streets mowing down pedestrians and forcing competitors into bloody collisions. The game settings can be adjusted so that running down innocent bystanders actually increases a player's point total. Surely, if there's any video game that might raise a parent's ire, Carmageddon 2 is one of them.
Studies have shown that violent video games are more likely than non-violent games to induce aggressive behavior, even after very short playing sessions. But more recent research (by Dmitri Williams and Marko Skoric) has suggested that violent game play does not always lead to aggression. In Asheron 2, Williams and Skoric note, players are not allowed to attack other humans, only monsters, and they must cooperate with other players to succeed. Perhaps by limiting violent actions and rewarding cooperation, Asheron 2 discourages aggressive behavior. Other studies have shown that people who watch violent television shows where the perpetrator is punished are less aggressive than those watching violent TV behavior that is rewarded.
Nicholas L. Carnagey and Craig A. Anderson wondered if punishment and reward are keys to whether violent video games lead to real-world aggressive behavior. Video games are different from TV, and players might become frustrated if they are punished for violence, leading to more real-world aggression. Noting that no study had previously controlled the punishment and rewarding of violence in video games, they designed a study to do just that.
Carnagey and Anderson utilized Carmageddon 2's customizability to create three study groups: in one group, participants were rewarded with points for killing innocent pedestrians and smashing into opponents; in a second group, they were punished for it; in a third "non-violent" group, pedestrians were removed from the game entirely and computerized opponent cars were programmed to behave passively.
Participants played the game for just 20 minutes, but even in this short time, different game-playing behavior was observed. Players who were rewarded for violence typically killed 80 pedestrians; those who were punished killed fewer than a third as many in the same period of time. Next the researchers studied post-game aggression in three different ways. First they measured aggressive affect. This was done by giving the State Hostility Scale, in which participants rate their feelings in categories such as anger, hostility, and aggravation, on a simple 1-to-5 scale. For a second group of players, they used a Word Fragment Task, where participants complete as many words as possible in 5 minutes. For example, "K I _ _" could be completed as "kiss," "kill," "kick," or "kilt." Those who used more aggressive options in this task were rated as having more aggressive cognition.
Finally, a third group was tested for aggressive behavior. Participants were led to believe that they were competing against another participant playing a different game in an adjoining cubical (after the experiment, participants were debriefed and the true purpose of the study was explained). They were cleverly primed to dislike this "player" by being asked to write an essay expressing their opinion on a controversial issue—abortion. After they completed their essay, the experimenter took it and told them their competitor was going to "grade" the essay. Then the participants graded the fake competitor's essay, which was chosen from two pre-prepared essays, so that participants always saw a paper expressing the opposite opinion from their own on the topic.
They played one of the three versions of Carmageddon for 20 minutes, and were given their "graded" essay, marked by the fictitious competitor with the lowest possible grade and indicating that "this is the worst essay I have ever read!"
Now, they were asked to perform a competitive reaction-time test. If a player won, he or she got to choose the "penalty" for their new nemesis (who they believed to be either a baby-killer or a woman-hater and also a poor judge of writing ability). The penalty was a painful noise played through headphones. Players chose before each test how loud the noise would be, and how long it would be played. In reality, the "test" was rigged so that the participant won 13 times and the non-existent "competitor" won 12 times, inflicting a noise blast of a pre-selected length and intensity. When the participant won, he or she got to get "revenge." Even though the real participants weren't really hurting anyone, they certainly believed they were. Players who gave louder and longer penalties were clearly behaving more aggressively than those who gave less extreme penalties.
Now let's take a look at the results for these three different measures of aggression. The different rating systems have been converted into z-scores, which is a way of placing numerically different scores onto a similar scale so that they can be compared. In each case, a greater z-score corresponds to more aggressive behavior or attitude.
It's clear that the version of Carmageddon 2 that rewarded violence led to the most aggression. Though the difference between the reward/punishment scores was actually not significant in the aggressive affect measure, it was in the other two measures, and in every case, the version that rewarded violence led to more aggression than the nonviolent version. However, it's important to realize that the negative z-scores in this graph do not suggest that a nonviolent game leads to decreased aggression—this is an artifact of the way z-scores are computed. All we can say from this graph is that playing nonviolent games leads to less aggressive behavior and attitudes than playing violent games.
Many defenders of violent video games argue that they are in control of their own actions, and that video games should not be restricted due to statistical correlations between playing violent games and aggression. In this, they may be correct, but that does not invalidate the results of this study. Playing games that reward violence leads to more aggressive behavior and attitudes than playing games which do not reward violence. Even if this knowledge doesn't reduce the number of people playing violent games, the knowledge can be used in other ways.
For example, I talked to my son Jim about the study. He's a typical 13-year-old who plays games that, while not as gory as Carmageddon 2, certainly offer their share of violence. When I pointed out to him that he is more likely to behave aggressively after an especially vicious gaming session, it was difficult for him to disagree. After he figured out that I wasn't going to take away his favorite games, he even admitted that it was a handy bit of knowledge to have.
Carnagey, N.L., & Anderson, C.A. (2005). The effects of reward and punishment in violent video games on aggressive affect, cognition, and behavior. Psychological Science, 16(11), 882-889
More and more human conversations are taking place online. While I don't do instant messaging the way my kids like to, I'm much more likely to contact a friend via e-mail than to pick up the phone. Here at Cognitive Daily and at other online discussion forums, I've built relationships with commenters who I've never seen or even e-mailed.
While the next leap in online communications—videoconferencing—is in its infancy, an intermediate form is beginning to show promise. Called a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE), it enables people to have a virtual online conference by creating digital representations of everyone they're meeting with. Instead of sending video images across the Internet, only voice and a little data about movements are transmitted. Computers on either side of the connection translate the motion data into a realistic animation of an avatar—an electronic image of each conferee. Even if fast Internet connections eventually allow widespread true videoconferencing, CVEs will still be necessary for situations when a fast connection isn't available, such as when one conferee is using a cell phone.
This brings up a serious issue: could one or more members of a CVE hack the network, sending motion data designed to win over the other participants? It's not as far-fetched as it sounds. Research on face-to-face interaction has shown that people who mimic the gestures of the people they talk to are judged to be more likeable than those who don't. In an online setting, a conferee could program his avatar to behave differently for each person viewing the conference, custom-mimicking the other conferees for maximum likeability.
But perhaps likeability doesn't work the same way in a virtual environment. Jeremy Bailenson and Nick Yee developed an experiment to test if people respond to computers the same way they respond to humans. They gave students course credit to watch a persuasive presentation "read" to them by a computerized virtual reality embodied agent. The agent looked like either a man or a woman, and read the same script (a persuasive speech advocating requiring students to carry ID on campus at all times) in a corresponding male or female voice. The VR equipment allowed the researchers to monitor the body movement of the students participating in the experiment. For half the participants, the head and body movements of the agent mimicked the motions of the viewer—only delayed by four seconds so participants didn't notice. The other half of the time, the agent used the motions of another viewer, recorded during a separate session. After the session, viewers rated the agent on three different dimensions: social presence (how realistic the agent appeared); whether they agreed with the agent's proposal; and their overall impression of the agent—how positively they viewed the agent. Here are the results:
For all three measures, participants viewed the mimicking agent as more effective than the agent that displayed recorded movements. The viewers were all aware that this was simply a virtual reality presentation—that there was no real person behind the avatar—and yet they still found the mimicking agent to be more effective. So it does appear that a simple computer program can manipulate complex social behavior. Perhaps as people get accustomed to CVEs, they will become more aware of the possibility of social manipulation, but in the short run, this experiment shows the potential for danger in computer-mediated communication.
Balenson, J.N., & Yee, N. (2005). Digital chameleons: Automatic assimilation of nonverbal gestures in immersive virtual environments. Psychological Science, 16(10), 814-819.
As early as 2002, 60 percent of the total Japanese population (this includes infants, the elderly, and the infirm) subscribed to a cell phone service. Though the phones are banned in public schools, parents were buying them for their kids anyway—mainly, they said, to control their behavior and build closer bonds. Naturally, the kids soon figured out that they were best used to call and send text messages to their friends. As kids became more attached to their cell phones, parents became concerned that the kids were substituting them for face-to-face relationships.
With these concerns in mind, Kiyoko Kamibeppu and Hitomi Sugiura surveyed 651 Tokyo-area 8th-graders to find out how their phone use affected friendships—one of the first studies examining the impact of cell phone use on junior-high-school-age kids. Though the results were published this year, the survey was conducted in late 2002. Some of the key findings:
Nearly half of Japanese 8th graders own cell phones
Significantly more girls (58.8 percent) own cell phones than boys (41.1 percent)
While over 85 percent of cell-phone owners say they have a large or relatively large number of friends who own cell phones, only 62 percent of non cell-phone owners can say the same thing
When using cell phones to talk, they generally call family members, typically only a few times a week, but when sending text messages, they usually send them to friends nearby
54 percent of cell phone owners send more than 10 messages a day
On the subject of friendships, phone owners' responses were nearly the opposite of their parents' fears. Nearly all kids felt that cell phones helped them build more, deeper friendships—and there were significant correlations between these attitudes and the number of friends a child had. However, 27.8 percent reported that their messages were sometimes understood, and 48.2 percent felt insecure if their text messages were not replied to. 52.7 percent sometimes felt bad after sending a message.
Some of the behaviors the kids reported, however, flash danger signals to Kamibeppu and Sugiura. The insecurity reported above, along with the 37 percent of children who say the phones interfere with their daily schedule and 62 percent who say they cannot do without a cell phone are preliminary signs that they may be developing an unhealthy dependency on the phones, not entirely unlike alcoholism or "internet addiction." So instead of not socializing enough, the cell phone craze in Japan threatens to create a generation of hypersocialized children.
Kamibeppu and Sugiura's study provides some interesting preliminary data, but they suggest that more research should be done on these issues, broadening the scope to cover more geographic regions and ages of students, and also examining more closely the qualitative effects of cell phone use.
Kamibeppu, K., & Sugiura, H. (2005). Impact of the moblie phone on junior high-school students' friendships in the Tokyo metropolitan area. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 8(2), 121-130.
There is considerable evidence that using a cell phone impairs driving ability. The research has even reached the popular consciousness: hosts of radio call-in shows ask cell-phone callers to pull over before making their comments; drivers give wide berths to people who are obviously talking while they drive.
All this knowledge begs the question: If drivers are aware of the dangers of cell phone use, can they compensate for their weaknesses and effectively negate any problems from driving with a phone? Mary Lesch and Peter Hancock had been part of a 2003 team that had found drivers reacted slower to a stoplight when distracted with a simulated cell-phone dialing task. In a new article, they took another look at the data from that study to see if they could answer this secondary question: can drivers effectively compensate for the distraction of a phone?
In the 2003 study, participants drove cars around an outdoor test track and were asked to stop as quickly as possible when a red light flashed outside the car. Their reaction time, stopping time, and and stopping distance were measured. To simulate using a cell phone, participants had to indicate whether a digit flashed on a small monitor inside the car matched a phone number they had memorized before the task began. Participants were slower to react and more likely to go through the red light when doing the cell phone task.
The same participants had also been asked to rate how confident they were about dealing with the distraction, but this data was not analyzed in the original study. In 2004, Lesch and Hancock returned to this data with a new analysis. They divided the respondents into two age groups, older and younger, and analyzed the data for men separately from women. They then looked at confidence levels and reaction time. Here is the result:
Drivers with high confidence are those who indicated they were "comfortable" or "very comfortable" dealing with the distraction while driving. Low confidence drivers rated themselves "uncomfortable" or "very uncomfortable." The change in reaction time reflects how much slower a driver reacted to a traffic light when distracted compared to driving without a distraction—so a taller bar indicates poorer performance driving with a cell phone. If drivers were able to compensate for their weaknesses, we might expect that more confident drivers would show a smaller change in reaction time. This holds true for male drivers, but women—especially older women—tend to react just as slowly, whether or not they believe they are comfortable handling the distraction.
The participants were also asked to rate how demanding the task was, and women rated it as significantly less demanding than men—despite the fact that women's overall performance was not significantly different from that of men.
Though they consider this research to be "exploratory" due to the small number of participants (36), Lesch and Hancock argue that these results suggest that individuals are unable to assess the danger of driving with a cell phone. A common argument against banning cell phone use while driving is that drivers are aware of the dangers and can use their judgment to decide when it's safe to make a phone call. If nothing else, these results certainly call that line of reasoning into question.
Lesch, M.F, & Hancock, P.A. (2004). Driving performance during concurrent cell-phone use: are drivers aware of their performance decrements? Accident Analysis and Prevention, 36, 471-480
This is an image from the video game Asheron's Call 2 (source: mmorpg.com). Does playing such a game, involving regular practicing (albeit in a virtual environment) of repetitive, violent acts, increase our general level of aggression? A recent article in New York Times says no, citing a study by "a researcher at the University of Illinois," which found, according to the article, that "violent video games have no 'long-term,' or permanent, effects on aggressive behavior." Interesting, considering the article I discussed in yesterday's post apparently found exactly the opposite.
With some difficulty, we tracked down the study, by Dmitri Williams and Marko Skoric (this would have been much easier had the Times article noted the study's authors). Let's take a closer look at the study and see if it holds up to the Times' claims. Williams and Skoric tracked 75 participants as they played Asheron's Call 2, an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) which calls for regular fighting with an assortment of fantastic monsters. The participants played the game for a month, averaging about 56 hours of game play each. The average age of the group was 27, which, the authors point out, corresponds roughly to the typical video game player. The game also requires cooperation with other players in an online environment, and generally human players are not allowed to attack each other—only the fictional monsters in the game.
By studying participants over a month-long period, Williams and Skoric hoped to find out if video games can actually change people's behavior and attitudes over the long term. While some studies (such as this one) have found that violent games increase aggressive behavior in the short term, the only long-term data comes from correlational studies. Williams and Skoric gave pre- and post-study questionnaires to the participants assessing their general attitudes in aggression (using the Normative Beliefs in Aggression Scale) as well as asking whether they had been in arguments with a friend or significant other in the previous month.
When the researchers compared the results for the video game group with a larger group that did not play the game during the same period, they found no difference. For both groups, there was no difference in aggressive attitudes, and no difference in the number of arguments they reported at the beginning of the month compared to the end of the month. This does indeed sound like convincing evidence, but does it show that we have nothing to worry about in terms of video game violence?
Williams and Skoric say that the primary conclusion to derive from their results is that video games and other media must be treated differently. Much past research on video games has been based on earlier media violence studies. Video games, they argue, are different, because most games are played in a social context, unlike many laboratory studies where participants play only against the computer. Their secondary conclusion is that older gamers did show a marginal increase in aggression, suggesting that there is some concern with the growing number of older people beginning to play video games. Third, they suggest that the short-term effects found in other studies may wear out over time. However, they are careful to point out that since their sample included no young children and few adolescents, results may be different for this age group.
But their final conclusion is far from the conclusion reached by the New York Times article: they point out that video games, especially games that involve social interactions with other real players, are an incredibly complex phenomenon. A single study, on a single game, can offer valuable contributions to the overall level of knowledge about video game violence, but it shouldn't be used determine general government policy on video games. So, for example, this research, studying adults playing a social fantasy game, should not be applied to children playing a nonsocial, realistic street violence simulation.
Does Williams and Scoric's data undermine that of Gentile et al., discussed yesterday? The two studies hardly intersect. The average age of Gentile et al.'s population was 13; Williams and Scoric's was 27. Gentile et al. used participants' own ratings to determine how "violent" the games they played actually were; Williams and Scoric preselected a game they had arbitrarily determined to be violent. Gentile et al.'s most significant result was a correlation of exposure to video game violence with physical fights; Williams and Scoric didn't ask their participants about physical fights at all. In fact, like Williams and Scoric, Gentile et al. did not find a significant correlation between violent game exposure and arguing.
Let's face it: human behavior is astonishingly complicated; psychologists are still working on the "easy" problems like how we track motion and color. Understanding a complex social phenomenon like video games is not going to be a simple task, and making public policy based on that understanding will be even more difficult. Perhaps the best we can hope is for policy-makers—and the general public—(not to mention science writers) to understand that we're dealing with a limited set of data, and to not put too much faith in any single study.
Williams, D. & Skoric, M. (2005) Internet fantasy violence: A test of aggression in an online game. Communication Monographs, 72, 217-233.
Steven Johnson is a writer who I very much admire. I'm particularly impressed by his defense of video games and other technologies in his book Everything Bad is Good For You. However, in defending the good aspects of video games, he has also felt compelled to downplay their negative effects. For example, a recent blog post argues vehemently that video game violence does not lead to aggression. He makes his argument by examining a recent study which found a link between violent game exposure and aggression. I'd like to do something a bit unusual for Cognitive Daily. First, I'll examine the study itself, then take a look at Johnson's critiques and see how well they hold up.
The study, conducted by Douglas Gentile, Paul Lynch, Jennifer Ruh Linder, and David Walsh, examined survey responses for over 600 8th and 9th graders. The students were questioned not only on their exposure to violent video games, but also on a standard measure of hostility (the Cook & Medley Hostility Scale). Finally, they were asked two simple questions: how often they argued with their teachers, and if they had been in a physical fight in the past year.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the researchers found a positive correlation between hostility and both arguing with teachers and fighting. Exposure to video game violence also correlated with these aggressive behaviors, as well as with hostility itself.
Next, the students were divided into two sets of quartiles based on the data: 4 equal size groups were created according to their exposure to violent video games, and another set of groups was made for hostility ratings. Not surprisingly, the students that placed in the top quartile for both measures were most likely to get into fights. However, for students in the lowest hostility quartile, those who had the most violent video game exposure were actually in more fights than those with the highest hostility ratings and the lowest violent video game exposure. Here's a summary of this data:
Hostility
Exposure to violent video games
1 (lowest)
2
3
4 (highest)
1 (lowest)
4%
26%
15%
38%
2
16%
33%
27%
58%
3
24%
42%
44%
54%
4 (highest)
28%
37%
58%
63%
Next, they conducted a logistic regression analysis—essentially a way to isolate the impact of certain factors while factoring out others. After controlling for hostility, they found that exposure to violent games still accounted for a significant portion of the physical fights kids got into. Interestingly, parental involvement in regulating their children's access to violent games also had a significant impact.
Now, let's take a look at Steven Johnson's specific critiques of this study.
First, Johnson complains that the study doesn't compare its results to other activities that are potentially associated with violent behavior—playing football, for instance. In one sense, Johnson is correct to point this out: what if it turns out that football is a more significant contributor to aggressive behavior than video games? However, one might also ask just how many other activities researchers might be asked to account for—gun ownership, knife skills, karate class—the list is endless. None of these examples take away from the fact that a correlation was found between violent gaming and aggression. Perhaps all these other issues warrant further study, but they can't contradict the results of Gentile et al.
In a separate post, Johnson argues that this kind of study can't explain the significant decrease in violence nationwide over the past two decades—the very same decades in which video games have significantly risen in popularity. Again, in one sense, he's correct. But consider an analogy. If a 1940 study argued that bicycle riding results in a large number of head injuries, would you accept as a refutation of that study the argument that in the years between 1910 and 1940, there was a 50 percent decline in head injuries? Not if you also knew there was a 60 percent decline in horse riding during those same decades (I'm making these numbers up, by the way—the point is that it's entirely possible for overall violence to decline while video game related violence is increasing. It doesn't mean we shouldn't do something about video game related violence).
Finally, Johnson quotes the following passage from the Gentile et al. article:
In fact, statistically controlling for respondent sex, hostility, weekly amount of video game play, and video game violence exposure, the frequency with which parents monitor their adolescents' video game habits added a significant amount of predictive power when predicting physical fights.
Johnson uses this quote to suggest that parental control (or lack thereof) accounts for all fighting among youth. But this is not what the article says at all. In fact, I'd argue that it's a weakness of the article that it doesn't indicate what the contribution of video game violence is after accounting for parental control.
But Johnson takes this argument one step further, making the following claim:
Think about it this way: these kids who have heavy exposure to violent video games—their parents are letting them play at least 3-4 hours of these games a day. Isn't it reasonable to assume that there might be something else going on in a household where the kids are left unsupervised to play violent games with that frequency?
Wait a minute... I thought Johnson was arguing that video games weren't so bad. Now he's making the opposite argument—that any household which allowed kids 3-4 hours of gaming a day must have something wrong with it. You can't have it both ways—either video games do or don't promote violence. If you now make the claim that anyone who'll let their child play video games must be neglecting them and thereby promoting violence, you've got some 'splainin' to do. And what of the many studies that show that non-violent video games don't cause aggressive behavior? If leaving kids unsupervised to play violent video games demonstrates that something is wrong with a household, then why doesn't leaving kids unsupervised to play nonviolent video games indicate the same thing—unless the violence in the video games itself is part of the problem?
Johnson's conclusion is most suspect of all: "if you're an involved parent with a kid who doesn't have any major aggression issues, then playing some violent video games isn't going to make much of a difference either way." Remember, the data indicates that video game violence matters more than aggression.
None of this is to say that the Gentile et al. article is the definitive answer to the problem. No one study is. And I'm certainly not advocating the panic or censorship that Johnson seems to fear, especially given the positive aspects of many video games. But there's little reason to suspect that video games don't have an impact. As Johnson points out in his book, games can be powerful learning tools. Why should we suspect that when games teach us violent or aggressive solutions to problems, we don't learn those, too?
Gentile, D.A., Lynch, P.J., Linder, J.R., & Walsh, D.A. (2004). The effects of violent video game habits on adolescent hostility, aggressive behaviors, and school performance. Journal of Adolescence, 27, 5-22.
It has been known for some time that cell phones can lead to driving accidents. After watching the behavior of some other drivers on the road, I'm sometimes surprised that there aren't more cell-phone-related accidents than there already are. With well over 100 million cell phone users in the U.S. alone, the problem isn't going to get any smaller.
Until recently, there has been some dispute about exactly why cell phones are unsafe for drivers. Two high-profile studies in the 1990s suggested that any manual manipulation of devices in a car, including not only dialing a cell phone, but also adjusting the radio and other gadgets, led to poor driving. This has led to the rise of hands-free phones, voice-activated phones, and been accompanied by even more gadgets, including GPS, DVD players, and even video games in cars.
In 2001, however, David Strayer and William Johnson of The University of Utah conducted a study which helped narrow down precisely where the danger in cell phone use lies ("Driven to Distraction: Dual-Task Studies of Simulated Driving and Conversing on a Cellular Telephone," Psychological Science, 2001).
In their first experiment, Strayer and Johnson had volunteers perform a simple simulated driving task: using a joystick to make a cursor to follow a dot moving randomly back and forth across the screen (though this reminds me of the primitive "games" I used to type into my Commodore-64 from computer magazines in the early 1980s, it's a reasonable simulation of the cognitive demands of driving a car). At random intervals, the dot would turn either green or red. On a "red light," participants were supposed to press the "brake" button on the joystick. After a practice round with no distractions, participants either had a conversation on a handheld or hands-free cell phone (what did they talk about? The issues of the day while the experiment was being conducted: the Clinton impeachment scandal or the Salt Lake City Olympics bribery scandal). A control group listened to the radio or an audiobook.
Strayer and Johnson found no difference between people who used a handheld or hands-free cell phone, and no difference between radio/audiobook listeners and the driving-only condition. However, the cell-phone talkers missed more than twice as many red lights as the other participants:
In addition to the accuracy problems, cell phone users also showed slower reaction times compared to when they were driving alone.
But does any conversation lead to driving errors? In a second experiment, Strayer and Johnson used a similar apparatus, but instead of using red and green lights, they had participants drive over "easy" and "difficult" courses. The volunteers were first asked to simply repeat words to the experimenter over the telephone. Next they were asked to generate a new word starting with the last letter of the word the experimenter gave them (for example if the experimenter said "salmon," the volunteer could respond "nicotine"). The results were as follows:
Strayer and Johnson used a statistical method to measure the number of errors the drivers made. There wasn't a significant difference in errors on the easy course, but on the difficult course, when drivers had to generate words in response, they made significantly more errors. So the key seems to be not simply that drivers are having a conversation, but that they are actively generating responses. In these conditions, drivers are more likely to make errors. If word of this result gets out to the gadget-makers, perhaps the next must-have phone will have a conversation analyzer that automatically warns you if you're talking safely!
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Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
If you're older than about 20, you'll probably recognize the image to the left from an anti-drug campaign from the 1980s. The image was supposed to represent the effects of drugs on the human brain. While the effectiveness of the campaign is debatable, the fact that it now seems a quaint relic of a bygone era begs the question: are we repeating the same mistakes in the war on violent video games?
My son Jim's favorite game, World of Warcraft, only works on my computer, which usually resides in the kitchen. Inevitably, Jim's often playing his game while Greta and I are making dinner, and I have to say, the most annoying thing about the game isn't the violence or the sound effects -- it's the background music. We're constantly asking him to turn the volume down so we don't have to listen to that dull, repetitive music.
