PaulSpoerry.com

A pair of Harvard researchers are saying what everybody who’s grown up with a controller in their hand already knows, violent video games don’t turn children into killers. According to a newly published book, ‘Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do’, psychologists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson dispel common myths about violent games. In their two-year study, they found that there was no data to support any causation between games and real-life violence.

Kutner and Olson studied 1200 middle-school children in a $1.5 million federally funded study. Instead of studying the children in the laboratory, like other studies, the pair actually sat down and talked to kids after long bouts of game playing – sometimes in excess of 15 hours a week. The lucky kids played a variety of games from the very non-violent The Sims to grandma shooting, pedestrian bashing Grand Theft Auto.

They discovered that children who played violent video games – those rated Mature or above – were just relieving stress. Some children did exhibit some playful fighting after playing games, but this was similar to what children have always done after watching action or Karate-type movies.

51% of male children who played 15 hours or more of violent games per week were involved in fights in the past year compared to 28% who played regular video games. For girls, 40% of the violent game players were in fights compared to 14% of the non-violent players. Despite the figures, Kutner and Olson say this is just a correlation and that the fighting was probably due to an underlying psychological problem that children had before playing the video game.

Perhaps the most startling finding (at least for people the likes of Jack Thompson) is that boys that don’t play any video games at all are now considered to be socially inept. A danger sign for boys is “not playing video games at all, because it looks like for this generation, video games are a measure of social competence,” says Kutner and Olsen.

I wonder if Kutner and Olsen will now do a follow-up study to find out if the children who play GTA4 will have increased carjacking skills?

You can get the book online from Amazon for about $16.

I’m constantly mystified during discussions where people argue “they should show BOTH sides of the arguement about evolution in science class.” What they mean is that they should discuss Creationism, the belief that god created everything, in science class. I’m ALL FOR teaching creationism in a world religion or a philosophy class. However, creationism does NOT fall under the scientific method as a means to prove anything so it should stay OUT of the science classroom. It’s for this reason that, for instance, evolutionary biologist and astronomers, etc usually avoid the idea of Creationism altogether. It’s not that they do not believe in god… in fact many well know scientist are very religious. The avoid the subject because it cannot be proven. There’s no mountain of recreatable/verifiable evidence to back it up.

For those who have never had the opportunity to find out about biology or science, claims made by those who believe in supernatural alternatives to evolutionary theory can appear convincing. Meanwhile, even among those who accept evolution, misconceptions abound.

Most of us are happy to admit that we do not understand, say, the string theory in physics, yet we are all convinced we understand evolution. In fact, as biologists are discovering, its consequences can be stranger than we ever imagined. Evolution must be the best-known yet worst-understood of all scientific theories.

Read the rest of this entry �