Children who play violent video games regularly are more likely to become aggressive and hostile day by day, a new study says.
"It's important to know the long-term causal effects of violent video games, because so many young people regularly play these games," co-author of the study Brad Bushman said, in a news release. "Playing video games could be compared to smoking cigarettes. A single cigarette won't cause lung cancer, but smoking over weeks or months or years greatly increases the risk. In the same way, repeated exposure to violent video games may have a cumulative effect on aggression."
To prove the link, researchers from Ohio University, University Pierre Mendes-France and University of Hohenheim in Germany included 70 French university students. All the participants played video games on three consecutive days.
Some participants were provided with violent video games like "Condemned 2," "Call of Duty 4" and "The Club", while others played non-violent video games like "S3K Superbike", "Dirt2" and "Pure".
After three days, researchers evaluated the participants' behavior through a series of exercises, including an uncompleted story. Participants were asked to provide 20 things they thought the main character would do in the rest of the story. Violent or aggressive words or actions used by the participants were used to measure their aggression or hostility.
Researchers found that participants who played violent video games became more hostile and aggressive day by day.
"People who have a steady diet of playing these violent games may come to see the world as a hostile and violent place. These results suggest there could be a cumulative effect," Bushman explained. "Hostile expectations are probably not the only reason that players of violent games are more aggressive, but our study suggests it is certainly one important factor. After playing a violent video game, we found that people expect others to behave aggressively. That expectation may make them more defensive and more likely to respond with aggression themselves, as we saw in this study and in other studies we have conducted."
Findings of the study are published online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
