Nonviolent games make children well-behaved - Studies

Many researchers have touted findings that link playing violent video games to aggressive behavior in children. Three new studies now conclude that the other side of the coin also holds true: Playing nonviolent games promotes friendly behavior.

Three separate studies conducted in Singapore, Japan, and the United States were published concurrently in this year's June issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and all three report that playing peaceful, cooperative games promotes prosocial behavior.

While the researchers behind the three new studies promote this new link between nonviolent games and prosocial behavior, they still support a link between violent games and destructive behavior.

According to the co-author of the report, University of Michigan professor Brad Bushman, each study used different analytic approaches and was conducted in different cultures and age groups, and yet all three studies came to the same conclusion.

"These studies show the same kind of impact on three different age groups from three very different cultures," Bushman said, "The resulting triangulation of evidence provides the strongest possible proof that the findings are both valid and generalizable."

In one of the studies, researchers conducted an experiment with 161 US college students with an average age of 19. After they played either a violent, neutral, or prosocial game, participants were told to choose a puzzle to give to a randomly selected partner. They chose one of three kinds of puzzles that were easy, medium, or hard to complete. The receiving partner could win $10 if they solved all the puzzles. Those who played the prosocial game tended to be more charitable, assigning more of the easy puzzles to their partners.

"Taken together, these findings make it clear that playing video games is not in itself good or bad for children," Bushman said. "The type of content in the game has a bigger impact than the overall amount of time spent playing."

However, some doubt many of the findings reached by some psychologists. As GameSpot reported in February, Dr. Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Texas A&M International University, believes that 90 to 95 percent of psychological research is methodologically shoddy.