Things that make me say “f*ck.”

The Cycle of Violence (2007), a 15 x 15 feet installation by artist Zeina Barakeh.

What follows is a stunning argument — quoted exactly from the media psychology textbook I’m studying — about cultural desensitization to violence. I don’t feel like paraphrasing the text (it’s my blog and I’ll be lazy if I want to), so here it is, straight out of A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication, 5th ed. (2009) by Richard Jackson Harris, page 286. I hope it falls under the category of fair use. If not, the publisher is welcome to contact me and I’ll edit.

Box 9.6: Who Shoots Better, Soldiers or Video Gamers?

In studying historical battles, military psychologist David Grossman (1996) discovered that there was often more posturing than killing. For example, 90% of the muskets picked up from dead and dying soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 were loaded, over half of them with multiple loads. This was surprising, considering that it took 19 times as long to load a musket as to fire one. Such findings suggest that there was a lot of loading and posturing by basically decent young soldiers who could not bring themselves to actually fire their weapons. Another study found that only 15 to 20% of World War II soldiers could bring themselves to actually fire at an exposed enemy soldier. Once the army discovered this, they set out to improve this record through training involving classical and operant conditioning, desensitization, and a heavy dose of brutalization. Their results worked. In the Korean War, 55% of the soldiers were willing to fire, and over 90% were in the Vietnam War.

Grossman (1996; Grossman & DeGaetano, 1999) argues that we are doing the same thing with video games and violent movies, except that we start training shooters much younger. Teaching people to shoot immediately in response to the sight of the enemy is not always good soldiering or good police behavior, but it is successful video game playing. Associating brutal killing with entertainment greatly lessens the distress and inhibitions we normally have about such behavior, and that is what is going on all the time with teens playing a steady diet of violent video games as regular amusement. “We have raised a generation of barbarians who have learned to associate violence with pleasure, like the Romans cheering and snacking as the Christians were slaughtered in the Coleseum” (Grossman, 1996, p. 5).

Reference:

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

My question: Damn. Is this true? I know a lot of people who play violent video games, and none of them has tried to shoot me (yet). I *am* persuaded that the psychological tactics used to train soldiers would likely produce the intended effect. But the two contexts — war and video gaming at home — are different. Children have always played war games, whether with toy guns or joysticks. I’m not buying Grossman’s argument at face value. But still. F*ck.

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