How Video Games Effects Human Behaviors

HOW VIDEO GAMES EFFECTS HUMAN BEHAVIORS
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HOW VIDEO GAMES EFFECTS HUMAN BEHAVIORS
There are many studies that have been conducted to find out whether video games affect human behavior. Scholars have not had a consensus on the issue due to varied research designs that seemingly are affected by their biases. CITATION Fer151 \l 1033 (Ferguson, 2015) set out to find out how clinicians attitudes vary towards video games based on their age, gender and negative beliefs on the youth. The study provided strong evidence that the opinions of clinicians on the issue often ‘confirm’ their biases. The professional bodies such as APA and AAP also do not provide concrete evidence to back their standpoints on the impact of video games on individuals and rather institute policies based on moral panic. If experts’ attitudes to a particular issue are biased, then objectivity is a challenge. All the results and data from any study into the subject would be consistent if individual biases by the researchers would be cast out. There is lack of consensus about how video games affect human behavior because of the varied professional opinions stemming from gender, age, and negative beliefs on the youth and the existing evidence to violence desensitization cannot be linked to video games alone. Thus, media desensitization is caused by a myriad of factors in which video games are just but one of them but the desensitization cannot be mapped to it singly.
Violence desensitization from media consumption is not only from video games because subjects are exposed to other violent media. For any particular research population, nearly all respondents have consumed violent media from other sources such as movies and tv series. In this age of social media and the Internet, media violence is more prevalent than at any time in history. To accurately link video games alone to violence desensitization requires a multifaceted study design that accounts for the media desensitization from other forms of media. Distinguishing the cause of the media desensitization from a single experiment which features graphic scenes is inexhaustive in establishing the effect of media desensitization caused by video games.
The structure of the study lacked a control experiment to dissociate the impact of TV and other forms of media which the respondents might have consumed. The methodology of the experiment entailed exposure to a range of images; violent and nonviolent images as the experimenter evaluated their response. It is probable that those other media would have the same level of violence desensitization. Violence desensitization cannot only be caused by video games and because most of the respondents are likely exposed to other violent media, but the conclusion that video games causes desensitization is ...