Date post: | 16-Dec-2015 |
Category: |
Documents |
Upload: | opal-clark |
View: | 244 times |
Download: | 2 times |
Video Games, Psychology, and the
BrainTim Brunelle
Why study video games?
• In the U.S., 99% of boys under 18 and 94% of girls under 18 play videogames regularly
• The average young person spends 10,000 hours playing video games by the age of 21 – just 24 hours less than they spend in high school and middle school combined, if they have perfect attendance
• That’s a lot of time!
Why study video games?
• 2 out of 3 teen play action or adventure games – these often have violent content
• 32% of gaming teens report that at least one of their favorite games is rated M (or worse)
• 12-14 year-olds are just as likely to play these games as 15-17 year-olds
• So teenagers are playing a lot of these games
How do we study video games?
• The most common tool in psychology is actually pretty simple surveys
• We randomly called a bunch of families (like 6,500) with teenagers around the age of 13 and we asked a bunch of questions about video games and behavior
• We called the same families back every year until the participants were 19, so we could look at changes over time
What have we found?
Wave 0 Wave 1 Wave 2 Wave 30
0.20.40.60.8
11.21.41.6
1b: Alcohol Consumption Frequency
Low VG High VG
Wave 0 Wave 1 Wave 2 Wave 30
0.10.20.30.40.50.60.7
3b: Smoked in Last 30 Days
Low VG High VG
• 13 year olds who played a lot of violent video games (like Grand Theft Auto) were more likely to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, drive recklessly, and get in fights as they got older
• Looks like playing violent video games increases impulsivity, which leads to increases in deviant behaviorViolent Video
Games
Impulsivity
Deviant Behavior
Why does playing these video games cause people to make bad decisions?• What are decisions? How do we make them?
• Psychologists think there are two systems that work together to make decisions – they call this dual processing
• System 1 makes decisions quickly and automatically, based on desires and impulses
• System 2 makes decisions slowly and logically, based on goals and rules
An experiment with dual processing
So what’s going on in your brain?
• Humans are really good at using System 2
• Most animals aren’t so good at this – they rely more on System 1 – or instinct
System 1
System 2
So what’s going on in your brain?
• Certain video games might make players less likely to put on the brakes and use System 2
• So they become more impulsive, and less likely to stop themselves from breaking the rules
Controlled processing demonstration