In the first year core studies we look at Bandura and his ideas on Social Learning Theory (SLT). Basically, SLT says that we learn by imitation of role models around us. In his study he exposed children to an adult role model being aggressive towards a ‘bobo’ doll and then gave that child the opportunity to imitate this behaviour. In the findings, amongst other things, he discovered that those children who had seen this aggressive display were more likely to imitate this.
So what? It’s only an inflatable doll – well there are real life applications to this study in a much wider context. If people learn through their role models what if those role models are bad role models – or those characters in violent video games?
A new series of studies by psychologists in Iowa have found some disturbing effects of violent (even cartoon-esq violence) games and investigated the effects of this on those exposed to them. Here, briefly, are some of the findings:
From Study 1:
“Even the children’s violent video games –which are more cartoonish and often show no blood– had the same size effect on children and college students as the much more graphic games have on college students. What seems to matter is whether the players are practicing intentional harm to another character in the game. That’s what increases immediate aggression –more than how graphic or gory the game is.”
From Study 2:
We were surprised to find that exposure to violent video games was a better predictor of the students’ own violent behavior than their gender or their beliefs about violence. Although gender aggressive personality and beliefs about violence all predict aggressive and violent behavior, violent video game play still made an additional difference. We were also somewhat surprised that there was no apparent difference in the video game violence effect between boys and girls or adolescents with already aggressive attitudes.”
From Study 3:
I was startled to find those changes in such a short amount of time. Children’s aggression in school did increase with greater exposure to violent video games, and this effect was big enough to be noticed by their teachers and peers within five months.”
I think this shows quite conclusively that video games can have a massive effect on children’s behaiour and they could learn this aggression from imitating it from those games. Interestingly, the studies here didn’t find as much of a gender effect as in Bandura – could this be a result of changing social roles of men and women over the last 50 years? We do have to be careful not to act too hastily on this though as it could lead to massive problems and I don’t think PlayStation would be too happy either.
Your thoughts as always welcome in the comments :)