Gamers Are More Aggressive To Strangers 227
TheClockworkSoul writes "According to NewScientist, victorious gamers enjoy a surge of testosterone — but only if their vanquished foe is a stranger. Interestingly, when male gamers beat friends in a shoot-em-up video game, their levels of the hormone plummeted. This suggests that multiplayer video games tap into the same mechanisms as warfare, where testosterone's effect on aggression is advantageous. Against a group of strangers — be it an opposing football team or an opposing army – there is little reason to hold back, so testosterone's effects on aggression offer an advantage. 'In a serious out-group competition you can kill all your rivals and you're better for it,' says David Geary, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, who led the study. However, when competing against friends or relatives to establish social hierarchy, annihilation doesn't make sense. 'You can't alienate your in-group partners, because you need them,' he says."
Re:AArgh (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why do so many people...? (Score:4, Interesting)
We do, but this study is neither.
This is a pop/junk science questionnaire with only the filmiest pretense of rigor. Remember, people in the soft "sciences" cannot simply make claims and dress them up with rhetorical argument anymore. They have to be "scientific". This means that they dress up in white coats, conduct "studies" and present a few graphs, equations and/or statistics(Once again see . Apparently, this is enough to convince some that they are in fact contributing usefully to human knowledge. However, in almost all cases, you will find that these studies are politically or ideologically motivated and funded, with the intent to push or "prove" a point of view.
This study has successfully managed to push the point of view that "gamers are aggressive to strangers". This is what is being reported on Slashdot and countless other sites. Do you imagine that the author's are ignorant of this? Do you imagine that they will seek to correct this "misconception". I doubt it. I imagine the entire purpose of the study, from its inception, was to denounce and mischaracterise people who play video games. See how anti-social they are? They are meaner to strangers. This was more than likely the ultimate aim of the study.
Look who conducted this study. And evolutionary psychologist. People who spend their time coming up with all manner of ridiculous rationalisations for how we have "evolved" our various cultural behaviors; a premise logically flawed from its very outset. They are among the worst kind of cargo-cultists, debasing and perverting scientific methods in an effort to gain legitimacy for a field of study on par with phrenology. Sometimes I think that if phrenology has been discovered today, it would likewise be an accepted "scientific" practice.
Granting legitimacy to these people simply because they throw out a smattering of statistics is no better than doing so because they wore a white lab coat. This isn't science. It's science theater. A pantomime whose aim is convince the onlooker that rigor is being applied to the study, not to obtain rigor itself. The lay public is smarter than they are given credit for and legitimizing these studies damages public support for science is the long term. If we ask people to accept junk as science, then we shouldn't be surprised when they conclude that all science is junk.
Re:Bad feelings about killing teammates (Score:5, Interesting)
Killing soldiers is considered fair game because they are (or should be) prepared to die. We call those that attack civilians "terrorists": see 9/11. I don't value soldiers' lives less, it's just a different level of wrong.
You do realise that not so long ago that it was considered normal for soldiers to rape and pillage in conquered lands? Indeed, some have suggested that the coalition's failure to carry out reprisals (e.g. decimation) on civilian populations in Iraq and Afghanistan suspected of sheltering guerillas is one of the reasons why the insurgents continue to receive popular support there.
I don't agree with them -- I'm pretty certain there are viable alternatives -- but it makes you wonder.
Re:Why do so many people...? (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess that the OP simply thought this should be bleeding obvious to everyone, even without actually doing any research. The alternative/inverse would be that we are as likely to do harm to our beloved/friends as to a complete stranger, and that you "bond" tighter with friends than with strangers.
The Swedish king Karl XI has this figured out already in the 17th century when he organised his forces so that people would fight side-by-side with brothers, cousins and people from the same region as you are from. This improved morale and made people less likely to flee the battlefield as you knew you could depend on, and wanted to support loved ones.
Re:Bad feelings about killing teammates (Score:3, Interesting)
Part of military training is to counter people's natural tendency toward empathy. It's no good asking someone to kill another human being when they view them as the same or similar to themselves. Dehumanisation of the enemy is a fundemental requirement when training an army.
It always make me wonder, when I hear people here (in the UK) saying all these ferral youths and ASBO kids would be better human beings if they were subject to National Service, what exactly they think military training is really all about. Like we need kids who can garotte you with their shag-bands.
Then again, when you have governments and societies (like the UK (broadly)) which say that murder is bad, knife and gun crime is a horrendous thing, and that street crime should be stamped out hard, but they also train people to kill other human beings all the while calling them 'Heroes', you can't exactly expect joined-up-thinking.
Kill for yourself, you're a psycho, a murderer, a blight on society. Kill for your government and you're "our brave boys and girls" and a "hero".
Humans are crazy. *tap*tap*tap*tap*
Re:Why do so many people...? (Score:3, Interesting)
I can imagine it's something that's hard-wired into us as living animals, think of it like this:
If you take advantage of someone you know (and will see again), it is likely that it will come back to bite you in the future.
While if you take advantage of someone you will never see again, there will probably be no consequences in the future.
An infinitely better explanation can be seen by Richard Hawkins in 'Nice Guys Finish First': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6rgWzYRXiI [youtube.com]
Family Kill Fest (Score:2, Interesting)
I find this to be quite different. I've watched my husband, nephews, step-sons and brother-inlaws attempt to annihilate each other just for the shits and giggles of it all. Of course the best deaths are the most funny. But they are brutal to one another.
I guess I can chalk it up to that fact that they are a close knit set of men in one family and they are all talking on the XBox head sets when they play together. Interestingly enough though, if you watch the teenage boys who are rather skilled, the general observations is they tend to get mad really quickly if their older less skilled counter-part family members have a good game and kick their butts. That's when I've seen or heard the aggression. They don't like to lose to family.
But when it comes to strangers, I don't often get to observe thatm that much, but what little I have seen is aggression just to win. And when they don't it the language of sore loser that I hear. Rarely do I hear "...that was an awesome match".
China knows this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:AArgh (Score:2, Interesting)
I coach youth wrestling and see something similar. There are some kids who just cannot take practice against a teammate seriously - they joke around, their attention wanders, and the ADD kids become downright dangerous. But in a match, against a stranger, it's like their doppelganger stepped onto the mat - very focused, executing moved with speed and precision they never showed elsewhere. And the ADD kids change to - now they hyper-focus, which isn't very good from a coaches standpoint.
But then there are the other kids that, if anything, are harder on their friends in practice than they are in a match - they enjoy inflicting pain, but in a match they would be DQ'd. You know - sociopaths. And when you talk to their parents about it, you find out exactly where the kid gets it from.
Homosexual Lovers Make Better Warriors (Score:5, Interesting)
The Swedish king Karl XI has this figured out already in the 17th century when he organised his forces so that people would fight side-by-side with brothers, cousins and people from the same region as you are from. This improved morale and made people less likely to flee the battlefield as you knew you could depend on, and wanted to support loved ones.
See also the Sacred Band of Thebes [wikipedia.org] --
"Plutarch records that the Sacred Band was made up of male couples, the rationale being that lovers could fight more fiercely and cohesively than strangers with no ardent bonds .... The Sacred Band originally was formed of picked men in couples, each lover and beloved selected from the ranks of the existing Theban citizen-army. The pairs consisted of the older heniochoi, or charioteers, and the younger paraibatai, or companions, who were all housed and trained at the city's expense."
And let's not forget that it was the death of his "bosom friend" Patroklus [wikipedia.org] that send the sulking Achilles into a murderous vengeful rage ....
Re:Why do so many people...? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Swedish king Karl XI has this figured out already in the 17th century when he organised his forces so that people would fight side-by-side with brothers, cousins and people from the same region as you are from. This improved morale and made people less likely to flee the battlefield as you knew you could depend on, and wanted to support loved ones.
That's interesting because the British did a similar thing in World War one and it proved to be a disaster. Men from the same communities were encouraged to join up together, in the same regiments, called "The Pals" I believe. The problem was that they were posted to the same parts of the front line. While they got to spend time with their close friends, they all went over the top together and thus an entire village could lose all of its men between the ages of 17-40 in the space of one minute.
This I guess is illustrative of something else that had changed in warfare by 1914.
Re:That is why... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hold on a second... (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a major point hidden in there... we've seen for years politicians arguing that games cause violence and aggression.
Why aren't we seeing those same politicians complaining against sports ? Especially the particularly violent kinds like boxing, wrestling and ice-hockey ?
I mean, if watching a violent movie or playing a violent game is going to turn you into a killer... how is actually beating somebody unconscious better ?
But I guess we haven't seen a lot of convicted killers trying to palm off the responsibility for their crimes on Don King, it's just easier to blame EA maybe ?
Our society actively encourages children, particularly boys, to engage in one form of aggressive, violent and competitive behavior against their peers, and if they think about it at all, believes it a harmless way to burn off rage with fairly little risk of real harm (odd, last I checked you got a lot more sports-field injuries than gaming, and RSI is a much less damaging injury than a broken knee). While another form of harmless acted-out aggression is deemed to somehow worsen those same hormonal and societal stresses ?
Isn't this perhaps the single best argument yet against censoring games ? If we are going to censor them for potentially leading to violence, we must surely ban anybody under 18 from doing wrestling or boxing (or watching matches on TV), and probably American Football, ice-hockey and in fact
any other contact sport while we're at it...
There is no argument about the one that doesn't apply to the other (sports are *more* immersive than games, you are actually DOING it, not just pretending) - so since the very procensorship crowd is the same people who lament that some of us just don't LIKE sports and never did - well it does sort of leave them without a leg to stand on.
Re:Why do so many people...? (Score:4, Interesting)
I read an interesting piece somewhere about how a truly skeptical physicist should always be looking up when dropping something, because if the object falls down, then it's boring meaningless data, but if the ball falls up... then that's important.
Like you said... we're full of experiments that prove the nonobvious against the obvious. But even more so... we knew that genetic material was passed from parent to offspring for a long time, but when we found DNA, we learned the mechanism.
This research points out the MECHANISM by which something that we know to be obvious works. I find it as fascinating as DNA.
Of course, now I may just be a girl, and thus interested in the mechanics of social interaction... but I can't believe that boy geeks and nerds have been so abjectly turned off to social mechanics that they don't want to learn about how it works. Here we are, a subculture of people who love to pull things apart and see how they work... but we don't want to pull apart the ephemeral and latch it into concrete physiological responses?
That seems anathema to me...
Re:AArgh (Score:4, Interesting)
"I find your story interesting. The 'sociopathic kids', you mention that they're harder on their friends than in actual competition. Would it then be a fair assumption to say that they're in it to inflict pain on their friends rather than compete? And to complete the thought: would they be less interested in competing against strangers because their opponent is a stranger and thus the infliction of pain is less gratifying?
And what exactly do the parents convey that lead you to your assumption? Anything specific? I'm asking because this intrigues me and I'd like to know more about how you arrived at your conclusions."
The one particular kid I was thinking about would immobilize his opponent and then do something to cause pain to him, but not advance his position. One of his favorites was to lock a kid up and then grind his chin into the other kid's thoracic spine - it hurts a lot. I couldn't really figure out why all the kids complained about him until I watchd very closely. When I saw what was going on, I stopped it and pulled him aside, and asked:
"When wrestling, why do we inflict pain?"
"To hurt the other guy"
"Ok, why would we want to hurt them?"
"To make them freak out and give up."
When I explained that the proper use of pain was to "convince" your opponent to move the way you want him to move, i.e. toward his back, he looked genuinely dumbfounded. Since I know he didn't get his ideas from his coaches, I went to his dad and explained the situation and asked him to try and reinforce with his son that the point of wrestling is not to go out and hurt somebody. His father became immediately defensive, accusing me of telling my own son to go out and beat someone up - it was the tail end of a conversation about self defense with my son when he asked what to do about bullies when all other options fail (The main kid he was talking about was this guy's son!). His general attitude was - "My kid's not doing anything wrong."
The cosmic irony is that the kid was an awful wrestler who got pinned every single match in under 30 seconds. But after my talk with him he started winning - apparently he figured out that he wasn't going to be able to win by focusing on inflicting pain, so he tried a few moves. As a result, he and his father became much more enthusiastic and not only is the son back this year, his Dad has volunteered to coach. Serves me right for trying to help the little bastard.
Re:Hold on a second... (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember hearing that burning off aggression with physical exertion was widely advocated. Then it was found that it formed a habit of channeling aggression into physical expression.
Instead they advocated suppressing the aggression. Instead of building up a hidden repository of repressed anger as was expected by many, some psychologists showed their subjects were learning to eliminate their aggression instead of storing it up for later.
But I am not a psychologist. I cannot reference the studies. I'm just passing along an interesting point made by my psychology professor (for an intro course I was merely taking to satisfy graduation requirements). There's probably plenty of ongoing debate on the subject, as is often the case in soft sciences.