The connection between violent video games (VVG), aggression, and empathy continues to captivate attention. Debates about the impact of VVG on aggression and empathy, and their potential to cause real-world violence, remain heated within both the public and scientific communities. Twenty-four years ago, Craig A. Anderson and Karen E. Dill published a groundbreaking article in which they speculated that playing and enjoying "Doom," a violent first-person shooter video game released in 1993, could be a contributing factor to mass shootings in the USA (Anderson & Dill, 2001). Such claims frequently make headlines in popular media, despite the lack of conclusive evidence linking VVG to mass shootings (Ferguson, 2008). Similar attention-grabbing headlines were further bolstered by the American Psychological Association (APA) acknowledging in their 2015 Task Force on Violent Media that there is a consistent, well-documented, and well-established link between VVG and aggression/empathy.
As the gamer community continues to grow, now comprising approximately 25% of the global population (Statista, 2023), scholars have exhaustively examined the links between VVG, aggression, and empathy. Their efforts have been summarized in several meta-analyses, pooling data from dozens of studies and involving many thousands of participants. Yet, definitive evidence remains elusive. Some meta-analyses indicate small effects (e.g., Burkhardt & Lenhard, 2022; Prescott et al., 2018), while others report no effects at all (e.g., Drummond et al., 2020; Ferguson et al., 2020).
The question of whether VVG increase aggression or decrease empathy remains unanswered. This uncertainty was reflected in the APA's updated resolution from 2020, which highlighted that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support these causal links. Therefore, the debate continues, keeping the topic as controversial and relevant as ever. This situation motivated us to examine these effects in more detail in a study recently published in the prestigious scientific journal Computers in Human Behavior (Lacko et al., 2024).
Our longitudinal study of over 3,000 Czech adolescents spanned four waves of data collection, six months apart. We meticulously analyzed over 1,300 unique game titles reported by participants. Interestingly, the most popular games included Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite. The level of violence in video games was assessed via Common Sense Media and by two independent raters.
Employing sophisticated causal modeling techniques, we explored between-person and within-person effects in our study. Within-person effects allowed us to examine how individuals change over time in response to exposure to VVG, offering insights into dynamic fluctuations in behavior and psychological states. Simply put, this level corresponds to a causal interpretation. On the other hand, between-person effects focused on identifying individual differences, revealing stable traits that make some individuals more susceptible to the effects of VVG than others. Analogously, this level corresponds to a correlational interpretation.
In our study, we focused on two key effects at the within-person level: the selection effect, which examines how changes in aggression/empathy influence changes in VVG, and the desensitization effect, which explores how changes in VVG impact alterations in aggression/empathy.
Our study's findings on the within-person level (i.e., causal level) revealed that fluctuations in VGG did not correlate with changes in empathy or aggression. Specifically, we found no statistical evidence supporting a desensitization effect—indicating that playing VVG does not increase aggression or decrease empathy.
Conversely, when examining the selection effect, we observed that increased empathy was associated with reduced playing of VGG. Additionally, fluctuations in physical aggression were linked to changes in VVG, with effects varying over different periods of data collection. Interestingly, at times, an increase in aggression corresponded to increased gaming, while at other times, it led to decreased gaming. Notably, this positive relationship between increased physical aggression and greater VVG play was significant primarily among younger adolescents (11-13 years), with no significant gender differences observed.
At the between-person level (i.e., correlational level), we found that adolescents who generally play more violent video games tend to exhibit higher levels of aggression. Surprisingly, they also show higher levels of empathy. However, it's important to note that these correlations do not imply causation. Therefore, while it's true that more aggressive individuals tend to play more VVG, our findings suggest that playing VVG alone does not necessarily lead to increased aggression.
In conclusion, our study provides a hitherto little-explored insight into the relationship between VGG and aggression/empathy in adolescents. While our findings show no causal link between playing violent video games and changes in aggression or empathy, they do highlight the complex dynamics at play. Increased empathy was associated with reduced VGG, and physical aggression showed varied correlations with gaming over time. Importantly, while more aggressive individuals tend to play more violent games, this does not mean that the games cause increased aggression. More detailed findings can be found online online at the website of the publisher.
