Video Game Violence and Desensitization
In 2006, Carnagey, Anderson and Bushman have conducted research regarding the cognitive effects of violence in video games. Their research question was stated as the following: “Does exposure to violent video games decrease physiological responsiveness to real-life violence?” Accordingly, the hypothesis was defined similarly: “Violent game players would show less physiological arousal, desensitization, in response to real-life violence than would nonviolent game players”. To examine the stated causal relationship, the researchers used a two-group between subjects design. The experimental group and control group are exposed to two different levels of the independent variable. The independent variable, the exposure to violent video-games, is manipulated whereas the dependent variable they measure is the physiological desensitization to real-life violence. The subjects of the research …show more content…
They have taken several precautions to make sure that the threats of confounding and lurking variables are minimized. However, the external validity of the overall experiment is rather low. Thus, the results of the experiment might not apply to real-life situations. This is caused by several things, the participants were shown a video of violence, they were not experiencing a violent situation in real life. Secondly, the participants were all college students, thus they are not a representative sample of the entire world population. To solve these weaknesses, we proposed to make the violence the participants experience, more comparable to real-life violence. Secondly, we would use multi-cluster sampling to ensure our sample is representative of the entire population. Moreover, we would prolong the experiment to determine whether desensitization holds in the long
In 2006, Carnagey, Anderson and Bushman have conducted research regarding the cognitive effects of violence in video games. Their research question was stated as the following: “Does exposure to violent video games decrease physiological responsiveness to real-life violence?” Accordingly, the hypothesis was defined similarly: “Violent game players would show less physiological arousal, desensitization, in response to real-life violence than would nonviolent game players”. To examine the stated causal relationship, the researchers used a two-group between subjects design. The experimental group and control group are exposed to two different levels of the independent variable. The independent variable, the exposure to violent video-games, is manipulated whereas the dependent variable they measure is the physiological desensitization to real-life violence. The subjects of the research …show more content…
They have taken several precautions to make sure that the threats of confounding and lurking variables are minimized. However, the external validity of the overall experiment is rather low. Thus, the results of the experiment might not apply to real-life situations. This is caused by several things, the participants were shown a video of violence, they were not experiencing a violent situation in real life. Secondly, the participants were all college students, thus they are not a representative sample of the entire world population. To solve these weaknesses, we proposed to make the violence the participants experience, more comparable to real-life violence. Secondly, we would use multi-cluster sampling to ensure our sample is representative of the entire population. Moreover, we would prolong the experiment to determine whether desensitization holds in the long