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Comment by nchase | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of when I was at grad student in that area. It was really frustrating to read all of the studies from e.g. Anderson and Bushman asserting the links between violent media and aggression.

These publications were headline-grabbing, but some of the study design was laughable. The whole state of affairs led me to leave the discipline (which led me to a career as a software engineer). I'm glad that I did, because the reproducibility crisis hit hard within a few years of me deciding to do something else with my life.

Some of the studies that I read made me think that there was a link between frustration (caused by e.g. undesirable outcomes in videogames, or performance issues like high latency) and aggression, but of course the researchers assumed it was the violence.

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PS: if you want a real treat, take a look at how some of these studies measure "aggression".

My favorite was where they used the volume of hot sauce poured into a cup as the measure of aggression.

Hopefully they've come up with some better ways of measuring it since then.

Anderson and Bushman never met something that didn't cause "aggression." And in the several studies coauthored by Anderson that I have read I have not seen a definition of what they mean by aggression. I remember one mentioning "raising your voice."

Then the news media just reads the abstract and says "a new study shows videogames make you violent!"

Oh yeah, the "Hot Sauce Paradigm" easily quantifiable, never backed up that it actually correlates to aggression in real life. From Adachi and Willoughby (2011):

"Lieberman et al. [1999] found that scores on [the hot sauce] paradigm were positively related to both trait and physical aggression scores on the Buss and Perry (1992) Aggression Questionnaire, supporting the convergent validity of the Hot Sauce Paradigm, although to date no study has measured its association with aggressive behavior outside the lab."

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2cab/940f9292928a48d57c3752...

I think psychologists frequently struggle to delineate cultural criticism and science: from its inception those two modes of thinking have been uncomfortably intertwined; no one reads Jung or Feud as a serious scientists anymore (and if you do you'll see it's mostly highly caveated platitudes about human nature based on anecdotal experiences). But there is value in connecting cultural trends to personal behavior, it's just not always scientific.

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