MasterOfWorlds said:
Phyroxis said:
MasterOfWorlds said:
Yeah, as a former psych major,
and out goes
your credibility. If you took anything beyond general psych, I'd be surprised. You certainly have no grasp of experimental design (or, more importantly, Human Subjects constraints). Long, long, gone are the days of being able to directly observe aggression (see Standford Prison Experiment).
Seriously? You can't even spell correlation right.
Really? You're going to judge me based on the fact that I mispelled something, which is something most people do from time to time, I might add,
No, I'm not judging you on the fact you misspelled something. I'm judging you on the fact that you opened your post with "I'm an ex-psych major" as an assertion of expertise. Which it is not. Its like saying "I know how to use a hammer" and then calling yourself a General Contractor. It does nothing for your argument but make you look like you don't know what your doing. [http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority.html]
and because I switched majors? You know nothing about me. You have no idea how far I progressed along my psych courses before I found out that I liked sociology better.
I don't have to know your life story to evaluate your claims, and, honestly, your claims were found wanting. I didn't give you much time in my original post because your initial appeal-to-authority was all that was really needed to be addressed.
I've read several books regarding violence and the psyche, hell, I've even watched several documentaries and clips from the prison experiment. Don't presume to judge me because I might not have Psy. D. at the end of my name. And did you not read my entire post?
So having read many books (what kind, academic [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_literature] or pop [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_psychology]?) makes you an expert and thus exempt from having to present well-founded, logical arguments? Well, I'll concede that having read books could give you a great background from which to work from. That of course then begs the question, why didn't you source some of your vast library? Doing that would have given us a lot more to work with. In fact, if you can source me some of your books, I'd be interested in expanding my knowledge base with them.
And, if you had seen the prison experiments, you'd then know that as a result of them we can't do human subjects research involving violence, anymore. You claimed that the only way a study could draw correlation is if there was direct person-on-person violence, something that is almost certain to never happen in academia again (more on this later).
Also, while Psy. D. (and more importantly Ph.D) may give you a little credibility, leaving the degree out of an online debate is probably the best way to go. This is an internet forum, degrees mean much less than a solid argument. Besides, people throw degrees around online, all the time. They also tend to be horrible at arguing logically (actual Ph.D's have other forums in which to debate; scientific journals). Instead of inflating yourself with unverifiable claims (of degree, expertise, whatever), why not show your chops by throwing up some sound arguments (don't worry, I'll get to your original post)?
I said that it was because of things like this that I want I'm studying sociology and social psychology. Because I want to do research almost exclusively, and this would be one of the things that I'd do it on.
Wanting to study psychology and sociology is admirable (and is a trait I share, no less) but it doesn't lend credibility to your argument. It can humanize your online presence and make people feel as if they can relate to you more, but it does nothing to your argument.
I don't care if you disagree with me. I do care that your disagreement with me seems to be a personal attack on me, and not the seemingly reasoned argument in the rest of the post that you attacked me in.
Not a personal attack. You had no seemingly reasoned argument (getting to it). You started your post with posturing and you were not backed up by the rest of your post. Had you actually shown some proof of having relevant experience (in experimental design, logical postulating, etc) I'd have left your claim totally alone. But you did not. You said "I'm an former psych major" and to back it up, you used knee-jerk "feelings". That is fine if your intent is to express opinion, but you've said yourself that you were trying to argue with reason.
The original post
MasterOfWorlds said:
Yeah, as a former psych major, I'm calling BS on this one.
Already covered this.
Unless you show real violence happening to real people, and their reaction is the same to videogames, I'm not buying that it's a direct coorelation.
It is not necessary to show real violence happening to real people. If you honestly had read several books on violence and aggression, you'd know that there is no longer the opportunity in social sciences to study human-on-human violence, why? Because we have ethics, yay. This is why studies must now design proxies for violence.
Also, this entire claim is useless as its straw-manning to begin with. The authors didn't say violence, they said aggression. These are two different concepts. Violence is a subset of aggression. Aggression can be thoughts, intentions, feelings, and actions while violence consists of actions. The authors found a direct correlation between videogames and
aggression, not violence.
Sure, it does desensitize to violence to a certain degree, but I don't really think it'd be any more so than movies would. I'm not even sure that the fact that you're the one dishing out the pain in videogames has any more effect that watching a movie.
Never did the authors say that videogames were more desensitizing than any other form of media. They didn't study other forms of media in this study, so they couldn't make claims about it. They even went so far as to say vidoegames are probably
not the main source of aggression and that there are many different factors.
[/quote]
I find it amusing that some people say, "They're disassociating themselves from people by playing as this character." and some of the same people turn around and say, "They're becoming more violent because they play these games." People need to make up their minds.
Irrelevant opinionating. Its something I agree with, but it doesn't pertain to the article being discussed. This is also a tactic used to draw the reader into ally-ship with the writer, not through logic but through emotional connection.
This test is BS, the results are BS,
Because you say so! Are you really more qualified than an entire IRB, team of academic researchers, editorial board, and peer reviewers? Have you taken the time to read the article yourself, and actually evaluate it? This claim could be true (its highly unlikely) but you don't give any support for it, leaving what could be an incredible revelation to be just a cry out in the dark.
and this is exactly why I want to do sociology and social psychology, so that I'll be able to come up with better and more comprehensive tests than these.
Good! We need more people researching videogames. Just don't expect wildly different results. It'd be great if you could contrive an experiment to disprove this, but there is such a body of research now to back up the videogames-correlate-with-aggression claims that you'd be in for a Nobel prize if you could pull it off.
Ever think about looking into someone's background before allowing them to participate in the tests? For instance, someone that came from an abusive household might internalize it more than someone that comes from a "normal" family?
All of which are dealt with through random sampling [http://www.experiment-resources.com/what-is-sampling.html] and repeated studies. This is where your lack of experimental design knowledge shows through. Its not bad, nor does it mean I'm attacking you. It just means that you don't yet have the concepts needed to understand how this study is actually empirically sound.
[/quote]There are so many outside variable here that it sickens me that this was allowed to be published.
More opinionating and posturing without backing up your claims. What outside variables? Do you even know what that means?
Now, for my opinionating. The fundamental flaw with any of these comment sections is that there are people on this site who tend to knee-jerk. They think that because a scientific article that says vidoegames cause or are correlated to aggression means that that is an inherently bad thing that society and the gub'ment are going to do something about.
But, if you stop and look for a second, so many technologies and media forms have been demonized in the past. Games are just going through their time. Not yet have games been seriously attacked for being aggression-inducing, certainly not as a result of empirical studies (and much more as a result of fake experts asserting unjustified claims [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.263481-Fox-News-Says-Bulletstorm-Could-Make-You-a-Rapist?page=1]). Appeals to emotion and fear will always trump logic and argument, why? Because its so easy to fear something, and its a challenge to step back and cooly evaluate something.
So do gaming a favor and learn to argue logically, separate out the posturing from the logically-based arguments and critically dissect the studies that come into your view. Don't pretend like they're WRONG just because you dislike the findings, actually dig into them and figure out if they're unbased. If they're unbased, then show people why they're unbased, don't just give them your word for it. Why? Because if someone values them self to be logical, they can't fight against sound logic without being a hypocrite.
(Seriously, posts [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/7.286870.11331697] like [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/7.286870.11332486] these [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/7.286870.11323464] do no one any good. Good thing yours was a bit more reasoned than that.)
