Aggression can serve as a significant problem in social development, for children and adults alike. In fact, the number of violent acts have recently been increasing: in certain states within the United States, guns have frequently made appearances in schools. Although Western culture believes people are responsible for their own behaviors and that aggression is due to an internal drive, the social psychological perspective focuses more on the environmental factors. Thus, researchers have been studying the influence of external factors, specifically media violence, on aggressive behavior. Experimental and correlational research generally suggest that exposure to media violence is related to increases in aggressive behavior, attitudes, and beliefs. However, studies comparing aggression in males and females have had mixed results, so differences in aggression in males and females are overall inconclusive. This difference is important to find because although men may be more aggressive than women in general, environmental cues to aggression may be equally powerful in both genders. Many other studies have also found a relationship between violent video games and aggressive acts. Not only has the video game industry recently boomed, but also the most popular video games are very violent. Evidence exhibiting the influences of video games on aggression has been produced with mixed results. In a laboratory setting, this study (Barthalow & Anderson, 2002) examined how playing violent video games affected levels of aggression.
The hypothesis of this study was that playing the violent video game would result in more aggression than would playing the nonviolent video game. However, it is not clear whether this effect would be similar for men and women. Forty-three undergraduate college students, 22 male and 21 female, were recruited. To maintain a constancy throughout the participants, all of the students were not habitual video game players. In the experiment, Mortal Kombat was used as the violent game because of its popularity and level of violence; PGA Tournament Golf was used as the nonviolent game because it was deemed interesting and engaging enough to be compared to Mortal Kombat.
The participants were randomly assigned to play either the violent or nonviolent video game for 10 minutes. Then, they participated in a reaction time task in which they had to quickly click a mouse button right after an auditory tone. There were two phases of the game: in phase one, the opponent set a punishment that the participant would receive if he or she responded more slowly. The punishment was a white noise delivered via headphones. In phase 2, the participant set the duration and intensity of the punishment for the opponent. The severity of the punishment that each participant set for the opponent measured aggressive behavior.
This study confirmed the hypothesis: the results of the experiment showed that both men and women were influenced by the violent video games. Some strengths to the experiment were using a mixed-gender sample of adolescents and young adults, avoiding habitual video game players, and selecting a popular violent video game. On the other hand, some problems to the experiment were that more men than women may have liked the PGA Tournament Golf and, thus, got more engaged in it; more men may have identified with Mortal Kombat since most of the game characters were also male; a small sample size, which may have limited the generalizability of results; and the duration of game play.
After reading the report, some lingering questions regarded how the PGA Tournament Golf game was deemed engaging enough to compare with Mortal Kombat and whether 10 minutes for the duration of game play was enough to allow for the potential influence of the video games. In order to further understand the concept of aggression in social development, especially the difference between aggression in men and women, additional research should replicate the results of this experiment by using different games and a larger sample. As social development entails learning the knowledge and values that allow children to relate to others and contribute in positive ways, further understanding the concept of aggression will allow researchers to gain a better understanding of an instance when social development can go awry.