Some time ago there was an episode about anger management. In it, one of the experts did a quick little experiment where he had some college students write an essay, then told them that another student had graded it and said that it was the worst essay ever written, then asked each student how much hot sauce they would like to have the person who graded their essay eat. I thought it was a wonderful little experiment for the show, but it seemed far from perfect, e.g. it didn't appear to be double-blind, so I assumed it was tossed together just for the show. ...but then I had a look at the researcher behind the experiment, Brad Bushman.
http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/brad.bushman/home
It seems he uses this method of measurement a lot, and another favorite seems to be giving a person a volume knob which causes the other person to hear a loud sound, and telling them that turning it over a certain point will cause the person to go deaf. He uses these methods mostly for video game violence research.
While I thought the hot sauce method was amusing for the show, it's not what I'd consider a good scientific measure. If I'd been in the experiment, and given a five gallon bucket full of hot sauce, and an empty bucket to fill, I would have just dumped it all from one bucket to the other. Why? Why not? Sure, that much hot sauce would kill a person, but it's not like they'll actually eat it. People are smarter than that. It's a symbolic gesture, and so it can't be assumed to be relevant to anything I might actually do to a person. So it might measure how angry I am, assuming I'm not overfilling the bucket simply for comical effect, but it certainly doesn't measure how violent I am.
...and don't let the confusion between "anger" and "violence" confuse you. The episode was called "anger management" and the experiment was meant to guage people's anger, but anger management is all about not becomming violent with people, and the debate over video games is also about violence, not about anger. So a metric which measures anger isn't telling us what we want to know unless we first assume an absolute corelation between anger and voilence. A lot of people are perfectly capable of being angry without becomming violent.
The volume knob metric seems similarly dumb. You might be telling me that you've given me the power to make someone deaf, but exactly how seriously am I to take you at your word. Were a researcher to actually give someone that power, then put them in an experiment in which they expect they might exercise it, they'd surely end up in prison, and I might completely get away with it since, after all, I was under the control of an insane researcher. So am I really to believe I can make someone deaf simply by turning this knob?
Also, there is a disconnect between turning up a knob, an action which requires very little effort, and normal violence, where the person committing the voilence is typically very aware of what they are doing. Anti-gun people make the arugment that it's easier to have a momentary lapse in judgement in which you pull the trigger than it is to have a momentary lapse in judgement in which you strangle someone to death, as you can pull a trigger in an instant, but it takes time and a lot of effort to kill someone with your hands. This experiment goes so far as to take away the trigger and replace it with an everyday object like a knob, something which people have turned all the way up countless times in their lives without negative consequences. At least with guns, we can argue that something dangerous happens every time the trigger is pulled, and that people have had previous experience with the gun in training classes, whereas these kids were simply handed a dangerous volume knob and expected to fully understand it's silent but deafly consequences. ...and that's assuming they even took it seriously.
It seems they've effectively taken some kids, gotten them really angry over something, then given them real guns which look just like harmless squirt guns the kids have seen their whole lives, then said "don't pull the trigger or you'll kill someone," and then they say "look, see, video games cause gun violence" when the whole experiment is so far removed from reality that no one can take it seriously.
Another issue I have: In the experiment in the episode, being asked to write an essay isn't that unusual. Grading an essay isn't that unusual. Receiving a grade isn't that unusual. Being asked to punch a pillow when you really aren't
that upset about anything? That's rather silly. Being then given a "fill in the missing letters" puzzle in which you notice that every item can be completed to be a violent word? Rather comical. ...and there goes the credibility of the measurement.
If I'd been in the study, as soon as I'd noticed that more than two of the words could be completed to spell violent words, I'd been trying to think of violent words to complete all of the items just for fun. Those things were too easy, and I'd surely been looking for some way to make it more interesting. ...and again, filling out a puzzle absolutely has nothing to do with violent behavior. Someone might be more inclined to think of "rape" rather than "rope" when they see "r_pe" but that doesn't equate to being more violent, or even to being more angry. It might say something about their state of mind, but that something isn't necessarily related to anger or voilence.
I had other concerns with his methodology, specifically with how he delt with the possibility that violent people might simply prefer violent video games, and that observed corelations aren't the result of cause and effect, but I'm too lazy too look into his methods at the moment to remember what my concerns were.
Amusingly, I noticed when looking up information for this post an article which compared people's denial of video games causing violence in spite of all of the research to people's denial that second hand smoke causes cancer in spite of all of the research.
I wonder where the line is drawn between violent and non-violent video games. When I was a kid I loved The Legend of Zelda, where I would run around with a sword killing little woodland creatures for rupeys. I still love Super Mario World where the objective is to again kill innocent but apparently toxic to the touch wildlife, this time for seemingly no reason other than fun, as the ultimate goal is simply to reach the end of the level, not to kill anything. Now, granted, I do kill random bugs I find crawling around the house, but I don't think the two are related.
If anything, I suspect the case might be that certain people are succeptible to this, while the majority of the population isn't. Some people do seem to be deficient when it comes to switching their behavior from one task to another, and aren't capable of having different behaviors depending on whether they're in reality or imagination land. In this case, I do think it is simply bad parenting. If your kid is retarded, you need to treat them special. If your kid isn't retarded, you need to punish them when they misbehave until they learn the concept of different behaviors for different places.
People don't seem to know how to make their kids behave. Even my own sister's children were once little brats. One day they were at my house, so I took the opportunity to make them behave. My sister said it was impossible, but then her methods consisted of yelling at the kids and occasionally slapping them, methods far inferior to the good ol' time-out approach. So I waited for one of them to slap me at random (which was likely to happen, as like I said, they were brats) at which point I'd tell them to sit in a chair. When they didn't do this, I sat there and held them in place. They'd kick and scream and try to get away, but I told them they were sitting there for ten minutes, and that was that. If they wanted to slap me, then that just meant that in addition to holding on to them so they couldn't get away, I also had to hold their hands so that they couldn't slap me. Naturally, once that time-out was over, their first act of freedom was to hit me for being so mean to them. So we went for another ten minutes. Repeat a few times and suddenly they're willing to sit there without slapping me because they're tired of having their hands restrained. Repeat a few more times and they're willing to just sit there by themselves because they don't like someone sitting there holding them. Of course, my sister had tried time-outs herself and so she was sure I would have no success, but where she failed was in setting a time limit. She'd put them in time out until she felt like it had been long enough, which just taught the kids that once they were in trouble, all they had to do was appear especially lovable for a few moments and then it was over. They tried that with me. "I'm sorry" and "Can I get up now?" I told them that once they get in trouble, they're in trouble until their punishment is over, and so the only way to get out of trouble sooner was to not get into trouble to begin with. The key is to tell them how long they're in trouble for right at the beginning so that when it is over they see that anything they've done, whether it was being especially lovable or constanting fighting to get free, had no effect on how long their time-out lasted. Eventually they learn through experience that their only options are to get along with others and be allowed to play or not get along with others and not be allowed to do anything. However, it just seems that people don't want to put in the effort. They see other parents say "go sit in a chair" and it happens, and so they think it should be so easy with their kids, and when it isn't that easy, they assume their kids are impossible to control, rather than assume that it takes some work to get their kids to the point where they will do what they are told.
So to what degree have these researchers investigated the possibility that any cause and effect relationship might simply be the result of parents failing to teach their kids that what is OK in a video game isn't OK in real life? What methods I've read about for such research seem very crude, so I imagine the answer is "none at all." I'd imagine a message such as "violent video games are OK as long as you teach your kids that what is acceptable in video games isn't acceptable in real life" would be much more readily receivied, but the researchers seem to be telling us that parenting isn't a factor and that it is simply the video games which are to blame.