Violent Video Games, School Shooters, & Information Cascades
Often, the finger of blame is put on violent video games, as opposed to larger societal issues and policy, when school shootings occur. As the show Adam Ruins Everything discusses, no link has been found between violent video game usage and real world violence. The only exception to this are minimal increases of short term aggression, which parallels other activities such as sports. It is no wonder that video games often get the blame as we frequently see throughout history mass fear of new technologies. Despite this, video game usage has grounded itself to be commonplace in today’s culture, with 90% of young men being video game users. This percentage significantly decreases when looking at the percentage of male school shooters who partake in video games. The Newtown school shooter, for example, was cited by news outlets to play video games for upwards of 10 hours a day, but they failed to mention that the game he was playing was Dance Dance Revolution.
Not only that, but violent crime has been found to decrease when violent video game sales increase. Granted, this is merely correlative, but there is still a psychological story to be told here when combined with the fact that school shooters play less video games than non-school shooters. Patrick Markey, a video game psychologist of Villanova University, believes the aforementioned correlation to be the case because engaging in media displaces opportunities to engage in actual violent crime instead. Therefore, Markey postulates that school shooters play less video games because low feelings of social belonging lower the likelihood one “follows the herd”. Thus, school shooters would be less likely to follow information cascades.
As our course has stated: people are generally influenced by the opinions others hold, what they buy, and what behaviors they engage in. Additionally, in class, we strive to find the extent someone will “imitate others even if their private information suggests otherwise”. Given the above, a school shooter would be likely to have a much higher threshold to imitate others. Thus, the presence of this higher threshold in an individual may be a better predictor of violent crime than violent game usage. However, much stronger indicators already exist, such as access to education and poverty.
Links
Adam Ruins Everything: The Truth About Video Games and Violence
Violent Video Games and Real-World Violence: Rhetoric Versus Data (Markey, 2014)
Factually! Podcast w/ Adam Conover & Patrick Markey