Was Uvalde Shooter Groomed for Violence?

The Uvalde, Texas, families of children killed by the shooter, who purchased an AR-15 assault weapon a few minutes after midnight the day he turned 18, have lodged several lawsuits. They have sued Meta, owner of the videogame, Activision, because it “trains and habituates kids to kill,” according to the lawsuit. The shooter was reported to have played Activision since age 15. They are also suing the maker of the AR-15 offered in the videogame, Daniel Defense, and Instagram for aggressive marketing of guns.

Can violent videogames have such ill effects?

Researchers have warned for decades about the ill effects of violent media. See this list of negative effects I collected for the Good Media, Good Kids project when I used to work in the area of media analysis. To summarize common findings: those who are exposed to violent media habitually are more likely to be fearful of the world, be less sensitive to the sufferings of others, and act more aggressively towards others. This is not disputed. But there is disagreement about whether videogames are an added risk for aggressive behavior. I took a position about this some years ago in a blog post, Playing Violent Videogames—Good or Bad? One of the worries for adolescents is that playing a lot of violent videogames activates and trains up the more primitive parts of the brain (threat cue perception and reactivity) when the more deliberative capacities are supposed to be developing.

Violent media researchers typically examine aggressive behavior, which can include action (verbal, relational, or physical) intended to harm another who does not wish to be harmed, and the precursors of aggression (antisocial emotions, attitudes, thoughts). “Violence” is physical aggression that can cause severe bodily damage or death.

In light of the research showing that playing violent videogames increases the precursors of aggression, my students and I conducted a study with college student to see if we could increase the precursors of prosociality. We used a common methodology. Participants are asked to complete several story stems with 20 feelings, actions, thoughts, or comments of the protagonist. For example, “John stopped for a yellow light and the car behind runs into his car.”) There were three conditions for earning points that were equally arousing: helping (give medicine to the sick to keep them from dying, the target condition), violent (kill bandits before they steal the gold) and collecting (neutral condition—pick up the bags of gold before mice grab them). You can read the whole publication here.

We did not find a prosocial game playing effect, but we also did not find the usual effect of increased aggressive story completion for the violent condition. Instead, everyone across conditions had a statistically equal amount of aggressive responses. In fact, high numbers of aggressive responses held even when we added additional neutral conditions like ‘complete these story stems’ with no videogame playing at all. We concluded that students were coming into the lab already primed for aggression—by USA culture.

Daniel Grossman pointed out in his book, On Killing, that it used to be common for the military to have the most difficulty training recruits to shoot to kill another human being. After the advent of violent videogames, it was no longer a problem.

Interestingly, USian adults seem to have gotten less concerned about violent media over time. For example, it is hard to find up-to-date tallies of violence in children’s cartoons. Most tallies that come up in a Google search are a decade or two old.  According to tallies in 1999, one hour of children’s cartoons has four to five times as many violent acts as prime time television: 20-26 per hour. Children watch about 12,000 acts of violence per year and over 200,000 by age 18.

Perhaps adults became less concerned about violent media after the shock of 9/11. Look at the violence done to us. We must respond with violence (bombs, invasions, torture). Tit for tat (Kohlberg’s Stage 2 reasoning). In television shows like 24, which premiered in November 2001, Jack Ryan used torture each week to ‘save America.’ The show shaped the intuitions of West Point students to the dismay of their instructors and military leaders who asked Fox to change their stories, because in reality torture does not work for obtaining good information. (Fox did not change the show.) A desensitized, groomed USA went on to shock the world with the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, followed by torture (“black”) sites like Abu Ghraib. American soldiers were acting the opposite way of their predecessors’ reputations in World War II.

In the USA, we are groomed for aggression. A strong statement. Hollywood focuses on creating violent blockbuster films that attract their favorite demographic, 12-year-old boys. Violence on television is hard to escape—it’s common in commercials for food and insurance. I’ve written letters in protest. When violence is part of a commercial, I write to the executives of the company who makes the product, pointing out that it is unethical to depict suffering and make a joke or sport of it. They sometimes write back and apologize and sometimes seem to stop showing that commercial, at least in my viewing area.

Why am I so concerned about violent media?

The fact is, we are all being groomed by the environments we select or are forced into. Our perceptions of normality are being shaped. We are building our worldview, attitudes and even propensity for action. What we attend to and rehearse in our minds, let alone in real life with first-person shooting games, prepares us to act when the opportunity arises. Thank you, Iris Murdoch, for emphasizing this point. This is especially true for children and youth.

In one of my favorite books, Educating Intuition by Robin Hogarth, we are reminded of this as well. We learn most easily, through absorbing what helps us get needs met in the situations in which we spend time. We learn without effort, subconsciously, adapting to the procedures, rules and rewards that work in routine contexts. This is the easy kind of learning we do most of the time—when we hang out with family or friends, take up baseball or badminton, or videogames. Effortless learning contrasts with schoolbook learning where we must make efforts to memorize information or learn to read, write, add, etc.

Attending to the environments we regularly inhabit is a form of contextual mindfulness. We can learn contextual mindfulness as we attend to how an environment makes us feel (e.g., stifled and deadened in a small room with blank walls) and to which contexts propel us to do what (e.g., impulse buy because the boutique shop odor is so enlivening). When we learn to be contextually mindful, we (hopefully) can select environments that foster the types of habitual feelings and actions we prefer and stay away from environments that foster feelings and actions we dislike.

Immersing myself in the beauty of the Natural world calms me and makes me feel more connected to Being, to Wholeness. Then, when I close my eyes at night, I see images of plants and ponds. I much prefer this to watching or playing violent media and then closing my eyes to see battles and bombs.

In a future post, I will discuss contextual mindfulness and contextual effects from the perspective of our ancestral context, hunter-gatherer civilization.

 

References

Anderson, C. A., L. Berkowitz, E. Donnerstein, et al. 2003. The influence of media violence on youth. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 4.3: 81–110. DOI: 10.1111/j.1529-1006.2003.pspi_1433.x

Gentile, D.A., & Anderson, C.A. (2006). Violent video games: The effects of youth, and public policy implications. In N.E. Dowd, D.G. Singer, & R.F. Wilson (Eds.), Handbook of culture and violence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Gentile, Douglas A., Bender, Patrick K., Plante, Courtney, Schmidt, Casper, & Park, Soyoung (2018). Psychological Perspectives on Media Violence. obo in Psychology. doi: 10.1093/obo/9780199828340-0202

Grossman, D. (1996). On killing: The psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society. Boston: Little, Brown.

Hogarth, R. M. (2001). Educating Intuition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Murdoch, I. (1989). The sovereignty of good. London: Routledge. (first published in 1970)

Wang, Y., Mathews, V.P., Kalnin, A.J. et al. Short Term Exposure to a Violent Video Game Induces Changes in Frontolimbic Circuitry in Adolescents. Brain Imaging and Behavior 3, 38–50 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-008-9058-8

Ybarra, M. L.,  Mitchell, K.J., & Oppenheim, J.K. (2022). Violent media in childhood and seriously violent behavior in adolescence and young adulthood. CDC Stacks, 71(3).   http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2022.03.003

 

Key Links:

https://kindredmedia.org/2010/11/playing-violent-video-games-good-or-bad/

https://mprcenter.org/review/narvaez-prosocial-video-game/

https://cee.nd.edu/goodmedia/teachers/index.html

Center for Disease Control Posters about children’s daily time in front of screens:

10–14-year-olds: https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/47583

8–10-year-olds: https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/47584

15–18-year-olds: https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/47582