Professor, ECA Dispute Video Game Aggression Study

Earlier this week, we discussed research which linked aggression in children with video games. The Entertainment Consumer Association responded with a statement criticizing the research, as did Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Texas A&M. PCWorld sat down with Ferguson for a more in-depth discussion of the flaws with the study. In addition to bringing up the correlation vs. causation fallacy, he notes: "Even if you took it at face value, which I don't, video game violence overlaps somewhere between, based on their own statistics, a half a percent to two percent, with a variance in aggression. If you woke up tomorrow and you were half a percent more aggressive than you were today, would you notice that? It's just not much of an effect. If the author said look, there's a little effect here, maybe video games increase aggression a tiny bit, but it's not going to make anyone into a serial murderer, yeah, alright, we may argue a little bit over the methodology, though I'd still say they should've controlled for other stuff. "

Practical significance?

[tgibbs]

Ferguson, particularly in part 2, does a nice job of pointing out the problems with the study. In addition to the obvious difficulties in drawing causal conclusions from correlational data, a key issue is whether the effects that they are claiming to observe have any practical (as opposed to statistical) significance. To what extent does a small increase in "aggression" translate into an increase in real-world violence? And how big an increase? This is a key issue, because it is undisputed that real-world violence rates have dropped even as games have become more violent and more realistic. Moreover, as Ferguson points out, there is no correlation between media violence and real violence when you compare different countries. None of this proves that the claimed violence-inducing effect of videogames is completely nonexistant--but it does prove that any such effect must be so small as to be overwhelmed by other social and demographic factors that influence violence.