Meta-analysis uncovers no real link between violence and gaming

A review of the literature on violent video games reveals a field with strong …

The potential for a link between violent media and aggressive behavior has been a controversial one, especially when that media comes in the form of violent video games. Individual results have suggested a tenuous connection between violent games and aggressive behavior, but other work has found no such link. Earlier this year, we described work by Dr. Christopher Ferguson, who suggested a combination of nonstandardized experiments and publication bias (a tendency for researchers and journals to only publish positive results) could account for much of the confusion. Now, Ferguson has attempted to make up for the lack of standardization with a meta-analysis of research on the topic.

His introduction recognizes the challenges of studies of the topic. "It is not hard to 'link' video game playing with violent acts if one wishes to do so, as one video game playing prevalence study indicated that 98.7 percent of adolescents play video games to some degree," he writes, "However, is it possible that a behavior with such a high base rate (i.e., video game playing) is useful in explaining a behavior with a very low base rate (i.e., school shootings)? Put another way, can an almost universal behavior truly predict a rare behavior?"

To avoid these problems, he crafted a set of stringent collection criteria: he included only studies that used violent games and measured actual aggressive behavior, rather than scoring violent thoughts or taking physiological measurements. These criteria give a fair measure of the problems the field faces, as only 17 published studies over a 12-year period qualified. That set of 17 also showed a severe publication bias. When the bias was controlled for, there was no significant link between the games and aggression.

Perhaps as a point of comparison, Ferguson also looked at a second phenomenon previously linked with gaming: spatial reasoning criteria. Here, the body of evidence is even smaller: only seven studies during the same time period, also suffering from a strong publication bias. Despite this weakness, the apparent link between violent games and visuospatial cognition is so strong that it remains significant even after controlling for the bias.

Although it's possible to interpret these results to suggest that violent games can have a clear and specific positive influence on some skills, I don't get the sense that the author is actually advocating that. Rather, the discussion comes across as recognizing that the influence of games may have as much to do with their specific content and the psychological makeup of those playing them. If we're to take advantage of the potential positive effects of gaming while protecting those who might suffer ill effects from simulated violence, it will be critical to design experiments that tease apart these differences.