"Most mature people and gamers alike are most likely to disagree with this survey."

It was only a matter of time before the "gamer" perspective was thrust into the debate: the indignant denial that experiences of any kind, simulated or otherwise, can have any (lasting) effect on a person's behaviour or perceptions.

Not only are such views contradicted by common experience, they would exclude the possibility of things like post-traumatic stress disorder - that someone with a generally happy disposition who is unfortunate enough to have been in a war zone would return singing about fluffy bunnies and bouncing around between clouds of meringue.

Most "mature people" actually form judgements about such issues from the evidence available (including studies like this) instead of building up some kind of ideological position which conveniently justifies their lifestyle habits.

The study was conducted by two professors in a University setting which means their experimental design, process and analysis are all subject to multiple peer reviews, so I doubt the study has any obvious flaws such as Safak and Andy point out. If there are any flaws in the study I bet they are more subtle.

The people watching the violent movie knew bad acting when they saw it.

Were the people given a choice between violent and non violent game, or was it a randomized test?

Were the violent video gamers busy talking about how cool their game was, as they seem to have taken longer to "notice" the noise. That doesn't seem like an empathy thing, just they were distracted. They also seemed to have thier bullshit detectors in high gear.

Results: people who play non-violent video games are bored and easily fooled?

You can come up with statistics for pretty much anything, and skew them the direction you want.

For example, the article indicates those that were not subjected to the violent games "Helped longer" - it doesn't. The first thing that comes to mind when I read that, was quantity, (how many helped v.s. didn't help) yet that wasn't the case, is that because more of the people who were subject to the violent game "helped" ? And that just didn't look good for the article, so they changed it to the length of time they helped out for? And what was the difference a few secodns? I mean seriously, these statistics just smell!

This study is severely flawed.

Any prominent psychological scientist working in the area of emotional intelligence will tell you that this experiment is merely but an already proven psychological mind-control technique called "priming".

Studies into emotional intelligence have become increasingly focussed since the new millenium and almost all of the most respected organizations and social/political parties are basing their judgements on human behaviour not just on IQ but also on signs of emotional competencies.

Studies into "priming" have proven that a persons state of mind and behaviour can be influenced by the provision of sensitive information, which in turn causes patterns of synaptical judgements to occur, leading towards sub or unconcious stereotyping.

One such experiment was based on students taking university examinations.
The students were split into two groups of equally mixed students (in terms of sex, race, intellect and competence) and were made to sit the same exam in separate rooms.
One of the groups were "primed" prior to the examination by being told that women often do worse in examinations than men whereas the other group was not.
Consequentially, female participants of the primed group fared statistically worse in overall grade than those of the second group, whereas no real difference was noted in average marks across male participants.

Similiar experiments were conducted with regards to racial discrimination and with the same pattern of results.

Therefore, while the methodology of this violence/empathy experiment (of this article) is correct, the results have been applied in the wrong way and in the wrong context.

This experiment doesn't prove anything but the fact that priming an individual with violent video games before being tested causes behavioural changes in neo-cortical and emotional processing, such as the the loss of empathy (which, in itself, is a questionable result that omits other factors such as fear).

This experiment does not prove, in any way, that there will be long-term effects of violent games (as loss of empathy) or long term behavioural changes as a result.

We're suffering from excess empathy right now.

How else can you explain why anyone thinks it's a good idea to spend double the cost of the Iraq war on a "stimulus" package designed to pay off political contributors?

The only logical explanation is that people are thrown into an orgasm-like state by the prospect of giving away so much money to targeted recipients.

Empathy overload. We need more violent video games and horror movies if we're ever going to get tax cuts passed.

LOL. Very funny stolennomenclature, but I don't think it's that obvious.

Most mature people and gamers alike are most likely to disagree with this survey. Neither violent games nor movies kill empathy, but they probably affect our balance in other ways like the noise in cinemas which are often quite deafening and the fastpaced action can be quite distracting too.

I think it's more likely that the movie or game was deafening to the senses and they were probably too dizzy to notice what was going on at first, because even though they apparently reacted slower, they were still helpful as I understand it.

What else would any rational person expect? How could it be otherwise? What does it say about the intelligence of human beings that they would need to research something as self evident as this. I can imagine the headlines from future research efforts ... "Scientists discover that water is wet", or "Startling new revelation! Fire is hot!". The research they should be doing is into just how dumb can human beings get - now that could be a genuine revelation.

I'm guessing that perhaps they didn't test violent action games that involve team play. I think if someone has just been teaming they're more likely to behave as a good teammate and provide assistance to others.

People have associative minds. That's just how it works. So whatever a person has been most recently exposed to will temporarily affect their behavior.

I also suppose that if they'd been showing their test subjects sexy doctor movies we could have had an entirely different ending to their story. ;)

Yes I agree with what is mostly said here except Mike Brown's comment.

It's not paranoia, It's real! It's reported! It's done!

The fear, fear of being sued, Now I understand the Jedi's way of leaving Evil to die instead of helping it and it kills you afterwards. Hey look at that a violent movie that has practicality attached to it. Admittedly RARE as violent movies are concerned.

Other movies? You be the judge, but I do tend to agree with the study on movies that set violance as the ultimate persona and problem solver. And yes I watched basically every McGyver episodes.

It's best to call and wait for help! That's the system!

what really kills empathy is watching how the worlds biggest a**holes make billions at the cost of all those empathetic schmucks.

Or how do YOU feel when you see hard working people being laid off while the a**holes that caused it get multi million bonuses payed BY those hard working people.

Yea... so when i'm not felling too empathetic, it's not because of some violent video games, it's because the society that supports such ludicrous injustice.

Paratwa seems to be suggesting that watching violent movies increases litigious paranoia.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Violence in media producing a psychological effect is one of those common-sense opinions with ample anecdotal evidence that should be rigorously tested scientifically before it is relied on, although we don't want to deny things like post traumatic stress disorder. For one thing, my own unverified biased opinion also includes that people with a reasonable amount of human sympathy will run a mile to avoid a violent show, even though my late mother had an uncharacteristic great fondness for bloodthirsty murder dramas. So apart from mum, the film violence audience are freaks to begin with. These studies seem to have avoided that factor by randomising who saw what - but less easy to measure is a long term effect. Having just watched a nasty drama, you will be rattled and un-calm. What about tomorrow, though? Well, that won't apply if you watch this sort of thing all the time, you'll be always traumatised.

Over here most people would naturally assume someone falling over while on crutches was one of the 24 million benefit scroungers that plague this halfwit nation.

AG

Sadly here in the States the phrase "no good deed goes unpunished" is omnipresent. I'm more afraid of helping someone then becoming the target of their blame. Example: If the woman with the crutches falls down and I help her up, but she falls again then she could sue me for any injuries she sustained. Even if it gets thrown out of court the expense of hiring and attorney and lost wages from court appearances would be devastating. Such is our litigious society.