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Dr. Samantha Yamin (9:39)

On PlayStation, Switch, Xbox, and on Twitch, Kick, TikTok Live, and other gaming platforms, millions of people play and stream games to viewers all over the world. It's more immersive and more social than ever. And they're more violent than they used to be. At least back when researchers first started to ask whether violence in video games change how we think and how we behave. Dr. Craig Anderson has spent decades trying to answer that question. He's a distinguished professor at Iowa State University. Lifelong gamer, but also one of the leading researchers on media violence and aggression. Dr. Anderson has given the Presidential address to the International Society for Research on Aggression on you named it Violence in Video Games. What Craig has found is much more complicated than either side of the debate wants to admit, and we're going to get into it. Welcome to Curiosity, Craig.

Dr. Craig Anderson (10:30)

Thanks, Samantha.

Dr. Samantha Yamin (10:33)

Now, you said that you've been a gamer most of your life, and you're at the forefront of this field of research. So I'm just curious, what motivated you to focus on this?

Dr. Craig Anderson (10:43)

I had a grad student who was looking around for a dissertation, and at that point I had been starting to do more research on aggression in general. And she got interested in doing a study on an experimental study on how violent video games might influence aggressive behavior. And that dissertation eventually was published in one of our top journals and is now one of the most widely cited studies out there.

Dr. Samantha Yamin (11:21)

Ever since Mortal Kombat came out in the early 90s and then thinking of others like Doom and Call of Duty, this has been a big topic of conversation. We've been asking whether violence in games changes us, especially because we have these intimate relationships where we spend so much time engaging with them. So before we, we get into that, is there a difference between violence in video games or violent video games? Do you classify them differently?

Dr. Craig Anderson (11:50)

Now we talk about when we say violent video games, I mean, there's a whole range of violence within games. Some of the video games that, that have a lot of violence in them are actually developed for children, and they have cartoonish characters and happy music and whatnot. But they're still classified as violent because the player has as a primary goal killing usually the bad guys. But of course, in the Grand Theft Auto series, you're not killing the bad guys. You're killing good guys. There are reasons to think that the more realistic the violence, the bigger the effect, at least over time, will be. If you think about what a surgeon in training goes through, what a medical student goes through, most people's initial reaction to the sights and the sounds and the smells of an operating room is they want to throw up. It's built in to the human brain and emotion systems. But what happens over time is a kind of desensitization to those sites and sounds and smells and everything else. And in that case, that kind of desensitization, that physiological desensitization is good. We want that. We want people to not have this extreme negative reaction if they're a surgeon or there are other domains where you would not want that to happen. But one of the things that we've shown in several studies, and we being not just me, but other researchers in the field have shown, is that repeatedly playing a lot of violent, realistic, violent video games reduces your physiological reaction to scenes of real violence from the real world. That is, you don't have the same heart rate reaction, you don't have the same. Skin conductance is another measure that's used to assess anxiety. While desensitization itself is neither neither positive nor negative, it depends on the context. Most of us don't think that we want the majority of children becoming desensitized to scenes of harming other people. To have a whole society or a whole world brought up to not have negative reactions to scenes of people being disemboweled or shot or stabbed or strangled or whatever, that's not a good thing. At least most people would say, because it's that negative reaction that I think of it as the built in initial negative reaction that people have to these things. Helps put the brakes on when one is really angry and thinking about trying to hurt someone else. And if thinking about what might happen makes you uncomfortable, well, that decreases the likelihood that you'll actually do it. So but you eliminate that when you take that break off. That's not a good thing for society as a whole.

Dr. Samantha Yamin (15:26)

And so you've talked about desensitization and it sounds like you're studying it by measuring things like heart rate and skin conductance, like how much, I guess the hairs on our skin kind of prick up. And that on its own doesn't sound like enough to necessarily drive violent behaviors in people who are playing games. So there must be another component. I'm guessing it's aggression or some kind of additional drive there. So could you tell us about that and then how you test those things?

Dr. Craig Anderson (15:59)

Basically, I look at video games and one could look at social media of various types as well. These are essentially learning episodes. That is the human brain learns, you can't stop it. You can think of desensitization as a kind of learning. It falls under headings of operant conditioning and. Or other similar labels, classical conditioning and actually is very related to Al Bandura's work and others work on how people react to and understand the world around them. So the games, again, the point is that they're not just desensitizing at this very basic physiological level, but they're also teaching you how to think about the world in general. If you take a child and essentially school them on looking for enemies and teach them essentially a behavioral script that says if you find something threatening, attack it. And you rehearse that over and over again, you really develop this set of what we typically call knowledge structures things in the brain, relationships among ideas and emotions and potential actions. Basically you reinforce this view of the world that you have to watch out for enemies and that when you find them, you should attack. Rather than a very different kind of video game that might well teach cooperation, might well teach compromise as well. And in fact we've shown, and others have shown that playing pro social games and by pro social, totally nonviolent, and where your game character is helping other characters achieve nonviolent goals, whether it be some sort of environmental game where you're cleaning up the environment in some way. When we do these experiments in a laboratory, so we'll have some people playing, or some kids playing a pro social video game and others playing a video game that is neither violent nor pro social. So you can think of some of these kind of puzzle games where things drop from the top of the screen and you manipulate them in one way or another. Playing a pro social game increases pro social behavior immediately after that game is played. So again, we would take children, young teens into lab and randomly assign some of them to play pro social game and some of them to play an equally interesting, equally fun, but neutral game, not a not violent, just neutral, that the pro social game increases pro social behavior immediately afterwards. The longer term effects of repeatedly playing either a violent game or a pro social game, that takes a very different kind of research methodology. We can't do the ideal experiment, right? You can't take a bunch of 6 year olds, randomly assign half of them to grow up in a violent video game environment, and randomly assign the other half to grow up in a pro social video game environment and then follow them up for 30 years and see who commits the most assaults, right?

Dr. Samantha Yamin (19:50)

Yeah.

Dr. Craig Anderson (19:51)

It's impossible for multiple reasons, but you can track over time what the relation is between playing certain kinds of games on their aggressive behavior in the real world. And those kind of studies also confirm that there is this relationship that kids who grow up playing primarily violent games and do so a lot of hours and do so for many years are more likely to be physically aggressive in their day to day lives than kids who don't grow up in that environment. And that's even after you control for things like gender, socioeconomic status. This has been found across different countries. And again, the way to think about it in general is, and when I talk to parents, I frequently try to emphasize this, that you have to realize that these are learning environments and you have to learn that these games, whether intentional or not, are teaching values, attitudes, beliefs, as well as emotional reactions or emotional ties to certain kinds of thought processes. The result of that is you can have a very healthy video game environment or you can Have a very non healthy video game environment for your children and teens. You can't just say, oh, it's just games, it doesn't matter. It does matter. It produces different kind of people on the other end.

Dr. Samantha Yamin (21:39)

So you've explained how those knowledge structures that we learn in games are really the key. So it's not just the violence itself, but people who play violent games, they learn these knowledge structures that make them more likely to be physically aggressive. And on the flip side, people playing pro social games, they learn to have more pro social behaviors and socialize differently. So that's really interesting. Based on that, is there a consensus then that this is a true phenomenon? That there's this strong link between violence and games making people genuinely more aggressive? And if so, like, you know, why haven't we done anything about it?

Dr. Craig Anderson (22:21)

Well, the reason many countries have actually us is the exception.

Dr. Samantha Yamin (22:29)

Okay.

Dr. Craig Anderson (22:29)

The scientific community has overwhelmingly agreed that these effects are real. That doesn't mean there aren't people who don't believe it. They right there, there are critics. Now I should point out, although these effects are real and supported by literally hundreds and hundreds of studies, in fact, if you look at the broader media violence, so you include studies on TV violence and movie violence, and more recently on exposure to violent social media, there are thousands of studies, once you broaden it that far. And again, these effects are consistent across country, across gender, across age. But those effects are not what we would call large from a statistical standpoint. They're small effects. And that's because aggressive behavior as say a 20 year old is influenced by lots of things. There are longitudinal studies that allow you to look over time to see whether those who are playing and continue to play a lot of violent games become relatively more aggressive over time compared to how aggressive they were early. Which might well be influenced by a lot of factors including genetics, neighborhood violence, and there are a lot of things. But the longitudinal studies do allow you to tease that apart pretty well. And there are lots of longitudinal studies that, that have in fact found that yep, it is the case that the violent video game playing does serve as a causal factor over time. Even though we can't do the randomly assign kids to grow up in a violent video game home or an. What you can do is you randomly assign, say, I don't know, 10 year olds or 14 year olds to a treatment condition where half of them are assigned a condition in which their playing of violent video games is reduced, say for six months relative to a control group where they're not. They just continue to play whatever games they normally play. And there are a couple of these kind of. They're both longitudinal and experimental at the same time. There are a couple of those kind of studies and they show that in fact, reducing violent video game time reduces later aggressive behavior.

Dr. Samantha Yamin (25:32)

It's a very practical finding too.

Dr. Craig Anderson (25:34)

Yes. Yeah.

Dr. Samantha Yamin (25:35)

Asking the question in reverse is very applicable.

Dr. Craig Anderson (25:38)

Right. And of course, in those studies you're typically looking at real world aggression, who gets into fights at school kind of things, rather than what you might think of as the more artificial laboratory kinds of aggression. I should point out there that there's also considerable evidence that traditional what are thought of as artificial laboratory measures of aggression do a good job of measuring and predicting who's going to behave aggressively out in the real world.

Dr. Samantha Yamin (26:11)

Based on all the research you've done, what do you think is important for our listeners to know and to learn from and maybe change in their practice playing?

Dr. Craig Anderson (26:19)

The harmful effect isn't huge, but it's big enough to be both statistically significant and practically significant for parents or even for individuals who aren't parents but who themselves are gamers. And it's important to know that the kind of games that you play have an impact outside of the games. They change the way you see the world. They change the way you think about interacting with other people. It's very likely that you would never notice the change in yourself. Am I different today than I was yesterday? Doesn't seem like it. But the data show that it does produce long lasting changes. It's important because it is a factor that one can easily control whether you're the parent or whether you're the gamer yourself. Other factors known to predict aggressiveness, inappropriate aggressiveness as a young adult or even as a not so young adult. A lot of those risk factors are things you can't do much about.

Dr. Samantha Yamin (27:34)

Dr. Craig Anderson, thank you so much for being on our show. That was a fascinating discussion.

Dr. Craig Anderson (27:38)

Thank you. Very pleased to have the opportunity.

Dr. Samantha Yamin (27:43)

Dr. Craig Anderson is a distinguished professor at Iowa State University.

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Dr. Samantha Yamin (28:55)

On Marquee Memories from Setlist fm, your favorite artists tell us about the concerts that blew their minds as fans and how those moments helped shape who they are on stage today.

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Dr. Samantha Yamin (29:48)

The rednecked keelback snake might be bluffing its way through life. Or at least it's acting on autopilot. No matter what chemical weapon it actually has, stay away from the rednecked keelback snake. Found in south and Southeast Asia, it is venomous. For years, scientists have been fascinated by these snakes, mostly because they don't make their own poison. Instead, they're master thieves, stealing toxic compounds from the toads they eat. They store those toxins in nuchal glands, special pockets on the back of their necks. When something threatens the snake, these glands compress and out oozes a smelly yellowish liquid. The smell alone can deter predators. Scientists have been wondering if the snakes know how much toxin they're carrying in those pouches when their stores run dry. Logic suggests they'd have a backup plan, right? Maybe slither away faster or play dead rather than confront an enemy without their best weapon. To find out, researchers in Indonesia decided to put 23 wild snakes to the test. They simulated predator attacks by poking them with this sponge tipped hook. They first tested the snakes when the snakes still had their full toxin reserves. Then they tested them again after manually squeezing the snake's nuchal glands to drain out all of their chemical weapons, leaving them vulnerable. Surprisingly, despite having empty glands, the snakes were just as bold. It actually didn't matter if they were in full or empty mode, they still stood tall and postured, doing defensive moves like neck arching, which is a move meant to expose their glands. Sort of like saying, see what I have, you better watch out. It turns out the red necked killback snake doesn't seem to have a built in gauge for its toxin levels. They aren't checking their inventory before deciding to flee or fight. So then how do they survive if they might be unaware they're running on fumes? In their study, published in the journal Ethology, the researchers suggest the snakes might be keeping track of their recent diet. If they had a toxic toad, they might be more bold, but if they knew they just ate a fish, then they might act more shy. It's also likely the snakes never completely drained their toxins the way they did in the study, so in the wild they can usually safely assume there's something to work with. They have many pairs of those glands along their neck, so it really would take a lot of intense encounters to drain them all. Overall, the findings suggest the snakes rely on a set it and forget it strategy rather than like an actual internal monitor. And for the rednecked keelback snake, the bluff might be just good enough, even if they don't actually know if they're holding the cards for Warner Bros. Discovery Curiosity Weekly is produced by the team at Wheelhouse DNA. The senior producer and editorial correspondent is Teresa Carey, our producer is Chiara Noni, our audio engineer is Nick Karisimi and head of production for Wheelhouse DNA is Cassie berman. And I'm Dr. Samantha Youen. Thanks for listening.

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Kat and Nat (34:31)

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