Factually! with Adam Conover - The Truth About Violent Video Games (...They Don't Cause Violence) with Dr. Patrick Markey

Episode Date: August 7, 2019

Professor of Psychology at Villanova University and author, Dr. Patrick Markey, joins Adam this week to discuss the real science and research behind violent video games and violent behavior, how correlation doesn't mean causation, and whether or not video games are "release valves" for violent behavior. This episode is brought to you by Kiwi Co (www.kiwico.com/FACTUALLY) and The Great Courses (www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/FACTUALLY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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and there were a lot of things the 90s told me I should be afraid of. Street gangs, drug pushers, even snap bracelets, which according to my school teachers were at constant risk of slicing your wrists open if you weren't careful. But in 1992, a new threat promised to drive adolescent boys like me into lives of degenerate hyperviolence, the video game Mortal Kombat. For those of you who don't remember, Mortal Kombat featured gore even more gratuitous than its spelling choices. Kombat with a K, you know, it was fun. You could punch off your opponent's pixelated head, pull out your opponent's pixelated heart, and electrocute your opponent into a heap of pixelated ash. That's right, kid, you're not in Super Mario World anymore. Video games had always been marketed to boys, but in the 90s, the audience was growing up, so Mortal Kombat was part pixelated ash. That's right, kid, you're not in Super Mario World anymore. Video games had always

been marketed to boys, but in the 90s, the audience was growing up, so Mortal Kombat was part of a push to make games for man-boys as well. But now, by today's standards, the violence in Mortal Kombat was laughably cartoonish, but that didn't stop American parents from freaking the F out. Senator Joe Lieberman, who never met a moral crusade he didn't love or a public health care option he didn't hate, was incensed. He said, few parents would buy these games for their kids if they knew what was in them. We're talking about games that glorify violence and teach children to enjoy inflicting the most gruesome forms of cruelty. And Lieberman's push for the video game industry to regulate itself

worked, resulting in the creation of the Entertainment Safety Ratings Board, which quickly slapped a mature rating on Mortal Kombat. Finally, the innocence and virtue of our precious boys was secure, right? Well, wrong, because it just made the game more fun, because now when you played it, you also got the added thrill of breaking the rules. You want an adolescent boy to love a game? Make the only time he can play it in the dark at his friend's house after the parents are asleep. All of this is to say that I grew up in a world where skepticism of video games was just common sense. Despite the fact that I loved them, everyone, my parents included, told me that they were bad for me.

I mean, sure, they bought me an NES, but after that, they refused to buy me another system. So I had to scrape together $199.99 myself to buy a Super Nintendo. And that's in 1991 dollars. That's tough when your only marketable skill is long division. But despite the fact that my parents thought video games were frivolous, I now feel that I was actually getting a valuable education from them. My love of video games went hand in hand with my love of computers And in fact, I'd credit games with helping me become computer literate to begin with See, in a video game, you have to navigate a human-created digital system Understanding its rules, limitations, and abilities in order to achieve your goal Just like in a piece of computer software

And you begin to learn, okay, if the system lets you do something, it's probably for a reason. And if you don't understand an icon or a function right away, you can experiment to learn what it does. So while I was exploring every nook and cranny of Mario 64 or learning the complex battle system of Final Fantasy 3, okay, nerds, I know, Final Fantasy 6, I get it. But back then it was called Final Fantasy 3. I was also developing the basic digital literacy skills that later gave me the ability to teach myself to use Final Cut Pro and Photoshop years later. Hey, because what's video editing or graphic design but a fun new game you can play on your computer? The truth is, without games, I don't think I'd be where I am now. It literally gave me the tools I needed to help me build a career. Now, that was just my experience, but there's even some research to back this up.

One study found that gamers who play many hours a week persisted longer when given difficult anagrams or riddles to solve, suggesting that gaming could help motivate people through difficult tasks. gaming could help motivate people through difficult tasks. And according to Microsoft, they originally put the solitaire game into Windows to help people intimidated by the operating system by giving them something familiar and fun to do with their computer while also teaching them how to use the mouse. Once again, playing the game led to computer literacy. So look, there's no question that video games can have a positive influence on our lives, right? I mean, we're talking about a new art form that's been developing now for almost 40 years. And there are hundreds of thousands of artists in this industry making works of all kinds.

And sure, some of them have head explosions and spleen extractions, but others are beautiful, funny, quiet, or joyful. So games can do all sorts of things. Yet our conversation about them remains frozen, as though it were hit with some of Sub-Zero's icy projectiles in 1992. We're still stuck having the same old arguments. In response to the horrific shootings in El Paso and Dayton this past week, numerous of our own politicians didn't lay the blame on guns or

racism. They actually blamed video games. Why is that? And what is the truth about this issue so we can finally lay it to rest? Well, to help us answer those questions, our guest today is Dr. Patrick Markey, a professor of psychology at Villanova University, where he directs the Interpersonal Research Laboratory, and where he actually conducts research on what video games do to us when we play them. This is the guy who actually knows the truth about this matter, and along with his co-author Christopher Ferguson, he published the book Mortal Kombat, Why the War on Violent Video Games is Wrong in 2017. And before we get to the interview, I just want to say that this was recorded before

the events of the last week, which is why we don't bring them up in our conversation. So without further ado, please welcome Dr. Patrick Markey. Patrick, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me. So you're a professor of psychology. You study video games and their effects on people, correct? That is correct. I have probably about one of the greatest jobs you can imagine. Are you a video game fan? Sure. Yeah. I mean, I'm in my forties, so I grew up in the world of video games. And so like most adults, actually, I enjoy playing video games. You know,

this is really funny. I have another podcast I do called Humans Who Make Games. That's a video game developer interview podcast. First season came out last year and we've got a second season and we're working on now. But I have a first question I always ask people on that show and I think it's fun to port it over to this show. What's your first memory of video games?

Like what was the very first video game you ever played? I mean, again, I'm a little bit old. My first video game I ever played was Pawn at home with my parents. Yeah, thank you for laughing. My grandparents had a copy of Pawn at their cabin that we occasionally would like try to hook up to the ancient CRT TV that they had out there.

But I mean, hey, that's the big bang for home video games, Pawn. It was. I mean, that's what really started it all. And then it quickly went to the Atari, for us, the Intellivision, eventually Nintendo and Sega and PlayStation and now, well, Xbox and now back to PlayStation. So yeah, they've been a part of our family. With my parents and now with my children, video games are a part of our life, basically. Again, like most Americans, that video games are a very fun activity that I enjoy doing as well as, you know, again, many other people. Right. So do I. I mean, video games have been a part of my life as early as I can remember. I

got started with the NES. So that's my that's my big bang moment. Everything before that, to me, is like prehistory. And the NES is like what I followed along with. But yeah, it was simply a form of media that I've watched grow and evolve throughout my time here on earth. But as I was saying in the intro to this show, our conversation about games is so stunted despite the fact that so many people play them. There's so many different types of games available.

Games are capable of doing so many things. We've been sitting with this medium for close to half a century, which is, you know, I mean, if you compare it to film, for instance, we're like in the 50s for film. Like we're in the most fertile creative period. It's been with us for a long time. Everyone's going to see them, but we have this incredibly narrow conversation about them. And still, it amazes me that we're still having this argument about whether video games cause violence or contribute to violence. I thought that this had been put to bed, but it's been brought up even in recent years. So as a video game researcher, can you put it to bed for us and tell us what we actually know about video games and violence? They don't cause violence and we're done.

Okay. That's been a great episode. We'll see you next week. Fantastic. No, no, please expand. Please expand. Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously it's a really big topic.

I mean, and we wrote a book on this a few years ago and it's funny you bring up that you thought the topic was dead and we were writing the book. We were actually nervous, like, oh my gosh, by the time we're done with this, it's already kind of on its last legs. No one's going to be worried about violent video games anymore. But then, unfortunately, a new tragedy happens, and suddenly it starts up all over again, that we see it constantly coming up still to this day of people being worried about violent video games. And it turns out that the research done in laboratories, done in the natural setting and so forth, has been very

complicated. And there's been lots of methodological issues. But now it kind of seems like we're getting a handle on it. And I'm sure we'll talk about this as we go along. And that it looks like video games don't cause things like school shootings, what people are usually most worried about, or even societal violence. And how do we know that? From your perspective as a researcher, what makes you come to that conclusion? I mean, I think the biggest studies, and again, it's complicated, but I think the biggest studies are studies that are examining actual real-world violence. And so when we examine predictors of violence, what causes street crime, say, like homicides, aggravated assaults, rapes, and so forth, it's tricky to examine. We obviously don't do that in the laboratory.

What we do as psychologists and what criminologists do and sociologists do and economists also do is we look at trends in data. So we look at shifting of crime waves and things of that sort. And we see, can we use things to predict it? So for example, in the past, we've been able to, other labs have been able to predict things like heat. So when it gets hotter outside, we find that crime tends to increase. And that's great. I mean, but we're also all know the old adage of correlation doesn't mean causation, right? So just because they're correlated doesn't mean he causes violent crime. So what we do is we try to break that relationship. Our job of researchers is to think of any other possible third variable that might account for that.

And things like, you know, economic disparity, police presence, you know, incarceration rates, anything you can think of, and you throw it into the model. And what researchers find is they can't break it, that no matter what we do, when it tends to be warmer, crime tends to increase. Like in summer months. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We control for seasons too. So it's not just kids are off from school. Again, we try to control for all those things. And at some point we think, okay, you know what? There's enough evidence here that it doesn't look like it's a third factor that there probably is this real relationship. Now, when we look at video games, we do the exact same thing. But instead of looking at changes in heat, we look at changes in when people are playing video games. So when are people playing violent

video games? What's happening to crime? And we look at release dates. people are playing video games. So when are people playing violent video games? What's happening to crime? And we look at release dates. When Grand Theft Auto V came out, what happened to crime? Did it surge more than it should have or less? And actually what we find, and it's since been replicated by all kinds of laboratories, is that when people are playing violent video games,

things like homicides, aggravated assaults and so forth, all actually tend to decrease. That there's no increase at all. And the interesting thing is we don't see it then like decrease right after the game comes out and then increase rapidly a couple months later. It goes down and it stays down. It doesn't ever go, it doesn't ever like rebound from where it was at before. Now, could that have something to do with, I know that crime rates have been falling

overall over the last couple decades. Is it that? Is it just that crime rates, the longer time goes on, the more it goes down? Yeah, well, we definitely control for that type of trend. So you're absolutely right that in general, it's not just the fluke that video games are getting more popular and crime is going down. Aha, there it is. So we control for those trends. And we also do it not just annually,

but weekly and daily that when people are actually playing video games in one given week, we tend to see violent crime decrease. Or like I said, when video games come out, like when Grand Theft Auto came out, we actually saw decreases in homicides than what we would have expected before it was released.

And again, it's not just being explained by a general decrease in homicides. There is something that happens every moment Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto has been released. We've seen these bumps down in homicides. And how do you tell that this isn't just noise that, you know, I mean, you could also say, oh, hey, every time the, you know, we could track how often the local high school girls lacrosse team has a game and see how that's related to, you know, the crime rate and presumably seems to see some sort of effect. So how do you make sure that it's not just that? Very carefully.

So, and there's no full proof. Nothing is certain. So we can never be totally certain. But what happens is when we look at the data all different ways, and again, this is done by different labs using different studies or using different video games, using different methods, even some statistical techniques, no matter what we look at, if we look at, again, weekly sales, when people are playing video games, release dates of video games, it's always the same story that when people are consuming this violent media, we see it go down, violence go down.

So again, you may be right that perhaps all these different studies happen to have just gotten this fluke moment. But the point is that we've seen it so many times, we've never seen it go in the opposite direction. We've never seen when video games come out an increase in violent crime. So right now it tends to be that way. And it's also important to point out that also kind of goes toward the idea that it's probably not just a fluke, is this isn't unique for video games, that we see it with all kinds of violent media, that when violent movies are released, actually we find decreases in violent crime. Even one economist did a study where he looked at the area around a movie theater,

And even one economist did a study where he looked at the area around a movie theater. And what he found out is when they were playing violent movies, crime in that area went down. And even back in the olden days when I was playing my pawn games and you were just a dream in your parents' eye, you used to have to watch TV at certain times. Like, you know, you couldn't just Netflix it and watch it whenever. You had to watch, you know, your TV show at 8 p.m. on Sunday. And what they found out is when the violent television shows were airing on TV, crime also went down. So it's generally violent media as a whole. We see when we look at societal changes in crime, there's this constant link of it going down. Why would that be? That's the next question I'm sitting here wondering, like what, why would that, those things have that relationship? I mean, I've always heard,

I remember, you know, for years hearing, Oh, you know, violent media is how, you know, society exercises its demons. We're not allowed to kill each other anymore. So now we do it, you know, we, that's a release valve and maybe that even stops people from being violent. And I always thought, Oh, that's, that's a little, I don't know, that always sounded a little fishy to me. But, like, is it something along those lines? Or you saying this is making me sort of puzzle through what could that relationship mean. Well, your skepticism on that explanation is probably valid. That's what we call the catharsis model of anger.

And the idea is that it's an old Freudian idea, actually. And it's the idea that you have kind of this built-up anger inside of you, almost like a teapot that there's a cork on the spout of it and you can't let it out. And at some moment, it might just explode. It's a very Looney Tunes model of anger. Exactly, yeah. And so what you want to do in this model is you want to take that cork off every once in a while and let out a little bit of steam. And that kind of calms you down a bit. That's how this is the idea.

The rub is research doesn't really pan out that that always works out. Now, video games can certainly have a temporary reduction in your stress. If you had a bad day at work and you want to just do something to take your mind off of the bad day, playing a video game will reduce your stress if you enjoy video games. But that's not quite looking at this aggression, why people aren't committing violent crimes. So we don't, and research doesn't pan out. So when researchers have done things like had people punch pillows or, you know, punch a punching bag, they find they actually don't get, on average, they don't become less angry than they were before they did it. Oh, okay. on average, they don't become less angry than they were before they did it.

Oh, okay. Yeah. So we don't think that's why. And the reason why video games reduce violence is unclear. So the data are what they are. Our explanation, this is where it's much more tentative of why does it do that. We think it's actually pretty simple and not that sexy explanation, to be honest with you. And what we think it is, is imagine a school day that what you'll find is crime for children, or crime in general, tends to peak most after 3 p.m. during the weekdays.

And the reason for that is because children get let out of school, adolescent children, and adolescent males tend to be the most likely perpetrators of violent crimes. And they also tend to be the most likely to be victims of violent crimes as well. They get out of school and suddenly they're out of this supervised environment into the wild, if you will, and they're going to interact with each other. They're going to bump into each other. And it sounds very simple, but there's actually a name for this. It's called routine activity theory.

And the idea is that in order for a crime to happen, a perpetrator and a victim have to come together. That if you keep them apart, no crime will happen. So, you know, if they're in there in school and they're kind of supervised, it's okay. This is why prisons, a lot of people explain why prisons reduce crime is because you're taking people who commit crimes out and removing them from society. out and removing them from society. And what video games do is if you consider the amount of hours that adolescent males, again, the people who are most likely to be perpetrators and victims of violent crime, that they actually play video games, that they put themselves in their house, that they're essentially self-segregating themselves from society. Those hours are so

immense that we probably see a reduction in crime simply because the people are being removed from interacting with each other. Just because it's almost like a chemical reaction. It's like you need the baking soda and the vinegar to come together. But if the baking soda is at home playing Skyrim, it's not going to have a chance to bump into any vinegar. Yeah. I mean, it's very boring explanation.

I wish it was catharsis because that's way more exciting. But yeah, what it comes down to is video games are just something that people go into their houses and they seal themselves off from the world, essentially, not socially, because they can talk online, but physically they are. And they're playing games. And so therefore, we see drops in crime. Again, that's why we think it happens. We don't know for sure, but that would explain, again, why violent television, violent movies, and so forth, also have the same type of effect. Because the neat thing about violent media, if you will, is its number one consumer tends to be adolescent males. So in a weird way,

violent media targets that group that's most at risk for being aggressive or being victims of crime. And again, it removes them from each other. And it costs taxpayers nothing. But we probably see a reduction because it's almost this weird crime prevention program that happens. So maybe we should be looking forward to the next John Wick movie because, hey, I mean, it's a violent movie, but then all the people who are most likely to commit violent crimes are going to be at least for two hours, three hours sitting in an air-conditioned movie theater? Is that the theory? That is the idea, and that's exactly what was found

with the movie study that they looked at. So in that study, one of the movies they looked at was Hannibal, so it was done a while back. You can figure out how old it is. That's violent in a very different way from John Wick. John Wick doesn't eat people. No, he doesn't. So that's sort of like almost an epidemiological, like, population-based study.

But every so often I see reports of these studies where, you know, they talk about the effect of violent media on the person in the moment right after, you know, where they'll watch a violent movie or play a violent video game and then, you know, find that they became more aggressive right afterwards or something like that, you know, the actual effect of it on the mind and the body. What do we know about those sorts of studies? Sure. I mean, so the typical experimental study that's done, and this is where we can actually draw stronger cause and effect inferences when we do a true experiment, we randomly assign people to either play a violent video game or not play a violent video game. And how those studies usually go is they usually take college kids and they randomly assign them to play a violent video game for 15

minutes or a non-violent video game for 15 minutes. And then afterward, they have them do something to measure aggression. And the rub is there's a couple issues with this and with these types of studies. And one is how they actually measure aggression is really questionable. So keep in mind, most of these studies, people take the results and they generalize them to things like school shootings and homicides and murders and so forth. But what these studies are actually examining are not violence at all at that level. Instead, what they're examining are very mundane behaviors. For example, one of the more popular ways that people have examined aggression was simply after people play video games, they ask them on a questionnaire, how aggressive do you feel?

And what they find out is right after they're done playing this violent video game, they say, yeah, I feel kind of aggressive right now. I feel a little hostile. So it's this very quick reaction. Now, of course, this emotional reaction shouldn't be a big surprise because, you know, if you see a sad movie and I asked you right after you see that sad movie, do you feel sad? You're going to say, yeah, I feel sad. No one's worried that the movie is causing clinical depression. Or suicide or something like that. Or anything along those lines. The other way they examine aggression in these types of studies are

other kind of proxy measures of aggression. One way they've done it is they've done this thing where after you play a video game, they let you blast a person with kind of an irritating white noise, like kind of sound. And you have two knobs when you're doing this. You can either make the volume really high or you can hold down the volume for so long. And each of these knobs basically go from zero to 10. And what they find is people who play violent video games kind of blast people with this irritating noise. But the problem is how they standardize or how this is coded. There's no universally acceptable way. For example, some people just look at how high do you turn the

volume? Other people add how long you turn the volume plus your intensity. Other people look at how high do you term the volume. Other people add how long you term the volume plus your intensity. Other people look at, you know, they multiply those together. Some people have taken the log root of them and put them together. Altogether, there's 130 different ways researchers have combined these two things together. And the problem is one clever researcher in Germany showed is that you can basically make any study show anything you want based on how you score this assessment of aggression. And my favorite way that people have measured aggression in the past is the hot sauce paradigm.

And what they do in this is after you play a violent video game or a non-violent video game, you go and do some other study. You think you're doing another study, essentially. And as part of the study, you're going to make a person a taco. And you know this person you're making the taco for doesn't like spicy food. But you're kind of, beforehand, they kind of made you irritated at the person.

Like the person didn't like you. This is like a whole little live theater scene that they're doing for you. There's a lot of really bad acting and psychology experiments. Oh, hello. Would you take this test? Oh, by the way, I'm kind of hungry. Would you make me a taco? I don't like spicy food.

And then right after you make me the taco, then you'll take the psychology test. Like that. take the psychology test like that you this again your your laughter is only it's only sad because this is what's being used to suggest that um violent video games cause school students because what they find in these studies is people who played violent video games they do give a little more hot sauce than those who didn't and so i mean basically what all this suggests is right after i mean i eat a lot i eat a lot of hot sauce, Patrick. Like I put sriracha on everything. Is it because I play video games?

Like could that be what has created my taste for tapatio? It might be. It might be. But the point is that with these studies is they're generalizing these kind of mundane acts of aggression to horrific acts of violence. And that's where the problem really comes in. And that, yes, if you know a person who plays a violent video game, you probably don't want them to make you a taco, but there's probably no problem at all that you have to be worried that they're going to go on a rampage shooting because they played violent video games.

That there's this immense disconnect between what our lab studies can show and what we actually care about in the real world. And so, yeah. And the other issue with some of these studies is we talk about it in our everyday languages. Do video games have an effect or do they not have an effect? Like it's a light switch.

Like either they do or they don't. But really it's probably more like a dimmer switch in that maybe there's an effect, a small effect, a medium effect, a large effect. How big of an effect is there? And so what we do as researchers is people take all these studies that have been done and they average together the size of the effect that they have found. And the neat thing about this is there's been scholars who are very anti-video game and

there are scholars who are very pro-video game and they both have done this and they both find almost the exact same uh numbers huh and so you might think that with all the news media that these and again this is talking these mundane measures of aggression these are not talking predicting homicides this is predicting hot sauce type stuff and you might think with all the coverage of it that maybe violent video games has you know a 40 effect on the variability of aggression or maybe a 30% or maybe you're cynical, maybe 10%. But actually what they find is that the variability that violent video game play predicts in terms of these mundane measures of aggression is somewhere between 0.3% and about 3%. Wow. That it's this tiny, tiny bit,

and it's a tiny bit of essentially an unimportant measurement of aggression. And the gap between that, so that extremely qualified, narrow, clinical, here's the most that we can say is somewhere between 0.3% and 3% of aggression measured in this sort of wild way compared to the press that video games get when there are school shootings, for example, is it's this massive gap. I mean, I remember when I was a kid and, you know,

the Columbine shooting happened, I believe I was in high school at that time. I was certainly a, you know, a teenager. And, you know, a big part of the story was, oh, the Columbine kids played Doom. That we went to their houses and they had Doom on their computers. And I was like, I played Doom. Everybody I know plays Doom. This is like an incredibly popular game. And there's like, there was this cause drawn from it in the media that felt so out of control. And bizarrely, I felt like I was reliving a bad old memory when a couple decades later, I was seeing the same sorts of stories about more recent mass shootings. Yeah, no, I mean, the media definitely, I mean, unfortunately, one of the times that I get phone calls from the media to talk about my research is after a tragedy. In fact, usually when a tragedy happens, our press person at my university gives me a heads up that the media is probably going to be contacting you.

And I can't think of anything more sad than the fact that I only examine video games. I don't examine mental illness necessarily directly. I don't examine guns. I don't examine any of these. I examine if people play Mortal Kombat, like that's what I'm looking at. Yeah. And it's in these huge tragedies that suddenly scholars who examine video games become, the media wants to talk to us. And it definitely did. You're right. Columbine was really the birth, if you will, of this moral panic around violent video games. And it's exactly for what you said because they did play violent video games. And it's exactly for what you said, because they did play violent video games. They played Doom. But then there were a lot of myths that built up around that that were completely incorrect. And we've seen it in more recent school shootings were kind of these

perpetual myths that school shooters play violent video games keep being told. And what we find out is it's actually not true at all. I believe the Sandy Hook shooting, they were also saying that that kid played video games. Is that correct? Yeah, well, he definitely played video games. And again, it shouldn't be a surprise. 70%, well, now it's even more, but about five, six years ago, the last survey was

70% of adolescent males play violent video games regularly. So, I mean, it'd be more unusual to find that he didn't play violent video games. Yeah. And so, he definitely played it. He owned Call of Duty, which was suggested that he was mimicking in some of the news coverage of it. And it was even suggested that he isolated himself in this basement of video games

and violence and obsessed over them and so forth. But actually what came out after the investigation was conducted was, it was interesting that they followed his – they could track his movement before the shooting using GPS of where he had gone. And he kept going to this local movie theater for a few hours almost every day, and they couldn't figure out what he was doing there. And when they went to the local movie theater, they found out what he was doing there. He was playing video games, but he wasn't playing a violent video game. He was obsessively playing Dance Dance Revolution. And then even interviews with his acquaintances.

One of the most wholesome games that you can play. You're getting exercise. You're jumping around. It's upbeat music. It's like a very positive game. It's linked to a school shooting as far as I know. Yeah. And then they also found out by talking to acquaintances of his that they asked him what his favorite games were.

And his favorite game was Super Mario Brothers. Yeah. So, again, he owned Call of Duty just like how you own Doom, just like how millions of people have owned Call of Duty. But the games that he obsessed with the most were dancing games and kind of, you know, moving around a cutesy plumber that was not this kind of training for a horrific rampage. And is this sort of moral panic? It seems to me that this is also a rerun that we've been doing for almost a century, that we've seen the same sort of moral panics around early film and comic books and those sorts of things that, you know, these movies are going to cause violence that I remember, like when the when the movie The Warriors came out,

people thought that gangs were going to start running through the streets because that's a movie about, you know, that's sort of a fantasy about gangs in the city. It seems like this is just a script that we're repeating over and over again. Yeah, and we're forever going to repeat it, that this is just how history works, that we can look back in time to the printing press and that technological revelation, the fact that they could print up Bibles in English caused this huge moral panic at the time. The waltz caused a huge moral panic at one point. Obviously, rock and roll music, Elvis in the 80s, the satanic panic,

rock lyrics was a huge one. At one point, there was a moral panic about Cyndi Lauper, that they had Senate hearings. These girls are going to want to have too much fun. Well, no, it's for sheep up. It was because, which is about masturbation. Of course it was. And they were worried that it was going to teach children, teenagers to masturbate. I mean, can you think of anything so crazy? Of course it's, you know, they're not going to do that. And again, that's the oldest thing ever. Like, you know, pop songs have had double entendres in them since, you know, Buddy Holly and Ooby Dooby.

Like, this is nothing new with Cyndi Lauper. No, and at the time, though, it's important to remember, like, we look back and we laugh at these now. We laugh at the time, though, it's important to remember, like, we look back and we laugh at these now. We laugh at the comic books. Like, they were really – there was a whole Senate hearing on if Batman and Robin actually cause homosexuality. There was an entire Senate hearing on that. There was a Senate hearing on, again, lyrics for music for Cyndi Lauper, Twisted Sister. And, again, now we look back and we go, oh, they're so silly. Look at what they thought.

But usually what we'll say is, but now today, video games, this is different. This isn't that. This is more serious. But it really is the exact same thing, that what we see over and over again is as technology advances and young people tend to adopt technology quicker than us old folks, that the old people get very suspicious of it. We get very worried about it. And what tends to happen is our fear of it tends to outpace data. And so you might be right. Initially, you had talked about how video games might be on the ebb of kind of being

worried about them, that it might be going down. And perhaps we are slowly getting out of that moral panic. But we're going to pop right into another one. It's going to be iPhones, virtual reality. Whatever it's going to be next is going to be the that moral panic. But we're going to pop right into another one. It's going to be iPhones, virtual reality, whatever it's going to be next is going to be the next moral panic. And then once that generation grows up with it, it'll move on to whatever the next thing is after that.

That it's just what continuously happens. And they can be very dangerous at times because they end up distracting us from potential real causes of, well, for video games, of what might be like the real causes of, well, for video games of what might be like the real causes of them. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the time that we spent, you know, the Sandy Hook shooting obviously being one of the most horrific events to happen in America in the last decade,

the time that we spent talking about what video games he was playing is not time spent talking about any of the other actual causes, his access to a firearm, his potentially untreated mental illness. I'm no expert in that case, but there are a lot of more important questions to be asking ourselves. Well, from a political standpoint, if you're a politician and you want to, first of all, if you're a politician after Sandy Hook, your constituents are going to turn to you. They need your help. They're scared. They need to feel like you're going to do something to save them because they're scared. And I mean, we all remember what it felt like after Sandy Hook. I mean, I had two small children. I remember putting them on the

bus to go to their elementary school a couple days later and being like, oh my gosh, this is terrible. I was scared. And so we turn to somebody to try to figure out what's going on. And if you're a politician, people are trying to ask you for help. You want to try to do something, but not lose votes. And so what do you turn to? You turn to a topic that most older folks who tend to vote and be more politically active don't really value that much. So you don't want to deal with guns or the messiness of mental illness. What's the easy thing to turn to? It's video games. Let's focus on video games. And then everybody becomes very happy because we focus on video games. We create checklists to predict who's going to be a school

shooter. We train teachers to talk about what kind of video games children should be playing and shouldn't be playing. That we do all these kind of things to kind of give us this warm, fuzzy feeling that we're actually doing something when in reality, it turns out, it's probably not really going to do much at all. Well, on that note, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Patrick Markey. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. Okay, we're back with Patrick Markey. I want to move on from violence in a second. But first, I do want to ask, if we know that violent video games don't contribute to school shootings,

and school shootings being something that we all would like to stop or at least cut down on the number of, what can we say about the typical school shooter that can help us understand these events and try to prevent them? Well, one thing that's interesting is the research I talked about before was looking at general street crime, if you will, general homicides and so forth, not rampage shooters like schools. And a lot of people have thought, well, rampage shooters at schools are different. They're a different breed than just, say, the average, you know, a person who might get mugged or something along those lines or commit a mugging, that they're different. And so one thing that the Secret Service actually did, and our lab did later on, was they created profiles of what does a typical school shooter look like? What are their characteristics and so forth? And it's interesting, if you look at the Secret Service report or our report, it's actually almost the exact same,

that what we find are the characteristics are pretty predictable. They tend to be guys, they tend to be students. A lot of times they had been bullied, they had depression, they had suicidal thoughts and behaviors previously. But one thing that they actually didn't do that much was play violent video games. That the average school shooter, and again, it depends on either report you look at, the Secret Service or ours, it ranges from about 12% to 20% of them had an interest in violent video games. 20% of them had an interest in violent video games. And when you compare that to the average high school student, which is closer to 70%, you actually find that there is a link

between violent video games and school shootings, but it goes in the opposite direction of what we've all been taught, that a school shooter is much less likely to play violent video games than the average high school student. Really? Now, yeah, now again, those are the data.

They are what they are. And so the question is why? And so what we think, obviously, this has nothing to do with keeping them off the streets because they're in schools committing these crimes. But what we think is happening is here is just violent video games are today a normative activity for adolescent males. Again, at least 70% are playing them all the time. And one thing we know from research is that when children or adolescents engage in normative activities,

it tends to be a sign of psychological health. That although we all want to be unique and special, people who do things that most of their peers do actually tend to be the most healthy. And one of the more interesting studies that showed this was done in the 1970s in Berkeley. And so think about the 70s for Berkeley. I know that's way before your time, but think about the 70s in Berkeley. So, you know, lawn hair hippies, you know, anti-establishment, very much against it.

And one thing everybody did is they smoked pot in the 70s in Berkeley. And what they found was that when people experimented with pot in the 70s in Berkeley. And what they found was that when people experimented with pot in the 70s, they actually tended to be more psychologically healthy than those who abstained from it. And we know for sure this isn't because pot caused that because we had ratings of them from when they were children. So before they ever got expressed to pot. And so what this suggests is that

even if it's an activity as parents, we don't like, like drug use or playing violent video games, even if it's an activity that might be harmful, the point is when the most children are engaging in an activity, it's actually a sign of psychological health if another child also engages in that activity. Now, again, it's important, but I'm not saying people should be smoking pot and that's psychologically healthy. It's simply that depending on the moment in time, if that's what most people are doing, a sign of psychological health is a child will also be doing that. Well, we wouldn't want to imply that just because a kid isn't doing what all the other kids are doing that they're going to become, you know, go on a violent rampage. Certainly not. you know, go on a violent rampage.

Certainly not. But I sort of see the point that if you're isolated from every other kid in many ways in your environment, that might not be a good sign for your overall mental health. And we also find that with video games, that kids who play video games actually tend to be more sociable than kids who don't play video games. And again, it's not that we're saying video games causes tend to be more sociable than kids who don't play video games. And again, it's not that we're saying video games causes kids to be more sociable, but it's simply that sociable kids tend to do things that their friends are also doing. And you're right. We all want our children to be unique and special.

But again, there is a level of what's normal for friends that also tends to be a sign of psychological health. And so, yeah, so playing video games might be for a school shooter, simply a or not playing video games might simply be an indication that they're not doing things that most other kids are tend to be doing at that time. Well, so this is a really nice transition to the other topics I'd like to talk about, because what I'm really interested in is we've spent so much time talking about video games and violence as we've done on this podcast, right? We've already spent about half of our time talking about just this one aspect of video games, when the truth is that

video games can do so many more things. Like you said that kids who play video games tend to be social. When I think of video games now, video games are becoming massively social. In fact, like the sort of old single player game where you play for 40 hours alone in your bedroom and you don't talk to anybody else is a little bit going the way of the dodo. Those games are becoming a little bit less popular.

And the games that are really massive hits now are games like Fortnite, which is, or Minecraft, which are both massively social games that people specifically play with their friends and, you know, are hugely popular among kids and have like, you know, the, the social nature of them is, is built right in. And so that's not a conversation that we've been having, like, is what contribution can video games make to someone's social life? I've just always found that so striking. Yeah, I mean, and you're right.

I mean, certainly being social with video games isn't totally new. I mean, the Atari 2600 had two joystick ports on it, and my pawn machine had two paddles on it. And, you know, Doom came out in 92 with the first deathmatch, and that we could hook phones together and at least shoot each other virtually on it. So, I mean, it's been around, but you're absolutely right. In the last, you know, five years or so, it's exploded in terms of how social games are. And what it really is and what we discuss it as is it's really this virtual playground that we go play at, that children go play at. And play is such an important thing that gets overlooked. It's important for children. It's important for adults. And so often people think, ah, it's a waste of time to play. But play teaches us. It teaches us social skills. It teaches us

how to take turns. It teaches us how to regulate our emotions. It teaches us how to follow rules. It makes us more open to other types of people that we may not have interacted with normally, that it is this great thing to do. And video games, when people have examined the cooperative nature of some video games, they've found that it actually has dramatic effects that, and it doesn't matter, I should point out, kind of bringing this back to violence, it doesn't matter if it's a violent video game or a nonviolent video game, it has the same effect that people who are playing games cooperatively tend to be more pro-social afterward.

They tend to also be more accepting of, again, the people they're playing with. So, you know, I'm from Philadelphia. And so I know that I'm not supposed to like somebody who likes the New York teams. But if I were to play a game with them online, I would be much more accepting of them afterward, that it simply just opens up our eyes to people we may not normally interact with. And again, it doesn't matter if we're, you know, trying to build a structure in Minecraft, or we're getting together, you know, guns and knives to rob a bank in Grand Theft Auto. The point is, we're working together to do this task. And that ends up becoming this nice cooperative thing that has a positive benefit. Now, I've absolutely had those

experiences playing games. And you know, I just think, for instance, a recent game this year that was a big hit is Apex Legends, which is a squad shooting game where you, you know, you join a team and you, it is a violent game. You have guns, you're shooting other people, but you're on a squad of two other people and you're in a world with, you know, a bunch of other squads and you have to be constantly communicating with your partners in order to make progress. You have to say, I'm going to go over here. Oh, look at the loot we found.

Oh, you know, there's folks off to our north, et cetera. And so, like, person-to-person communication is incredibly, you know, incentivized in that game, and so I can imagine how it could have exactly the effect that you're saying. However, I also want to bring in a sort of contrasting point of view, um, because, uh, video games are also sort of well-known for, uh, online for the culture of toxicity that has grown up around them in certain quarters, right? Obviously not everywhere. Um, and it's, it's, you know, uh, not, uh, universal, but, you know, people also experience playing, you know, an online game like the type we're talking about. And instead of feeling more close to someone from a neighboring city, instead they call them horrible slurs and yell at them. Like that's an experience as well.

That's an experience as well. Do we have any understanding of why that might be the case? Is that specific to the medium of video games or just to the communications medium? What's going on there? Well, come on. You know it's not to video games. I'm sure you've been on chat room forums and so forth and seen comments that, I mean, it may be specific to online behavior. But it's definitely not specific to video games. And, yeah, I mean, there are ugly behaviors that happen online, certainly. I think probably the best thing that's happening isn't so much that these

behaviors are decreasing necessarily, but people are learning better ways to deal with them. I mean, so nowadays, a lot of people don't play with random people. They don't turn on their, if they can avoid it, turn on their microphone and so forth, that I think people are dealing with it. It's an ugly part of gaming, though, that it definitely exists. And research is kind of starting on it. There's not a whole lot been done on kind of this type of behavior online and what it might do to people and so forth. But again, yes, certainly there's ugliness online, just like there's ugliness offline and so forth. Well, I think what I'd be curious to know, I'm glad that research is starting

because I'd really love to see how that could inform how games are designed. Because for instance, Apex Legends, the game I mentioned, they designed that game so that you can communicate with the other players without being on the microphone if you want to. They designed a system so that you can ping things in the game.

You see a gun and you press R1 and it says, I found a gun over here, like a little voice line plays. And so you don't need to necessarily be on microphone, which has enabled people to turn off, you know, okay, I don't actually want to hear other people's voices as given the ability to interact in a, in sort of a healthier way. And so to my mind, I'm really starting to see games more now as these systems that the designers are creating that can sort of bring certain behaviors out of us as we're playing them.

You know, it can make us feel certain ways. It can have certain effects on us. And I'm encouraged to hear that research is being done because I would love the designers of these games to be informed by the effects that they're actually having on people. No, I mean, your point about Apex is a beautiful point that I forgot about the system that had been installed in it. And it is great. And that's kind of what I'm saying is I think what's happening is a lot of game developers and, again, people themselves are learning better ways to kind of deal with online trolls, if you will, that I think we're getting better at dealing with. It's a shame we have to.

I'm not saying that this is great that it exists. But I think in general, we're becoming better at dealing with it ourselves or having game manufacturers deal with it rather than trying to change the behavior of the people that are saying horrible things. Again, it's been going on forever. I remember in Halo, when you first would get online, everyone would, as soon as somebody got killed, they'd squat on you and keep going up and down. Like, you know, you would have the-

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they'd teed bag you. Yeah, okay. They'd have these behaviors that would happen. We can say teed bag on this podcast. Okay. But yeah, so they would do this. I mean, it's certainly not new.

The technology makes it that you can do it with more people since it's not just typically your friends you're playing with. You can play with random people as well. So, if you go to a bar that's organized, you know, you go to a dive bar with loud music, you'll start shouting. You know what I mean? If you go to a quiet restaurant, you'll start speaking quietly. That, you know, the best of these developers are starting to realize that, oh, we can bring out certain behaviors by designing the game in a certain way. Whereas other developers say, oh, what, that's just, we have no responsibility for bad users and we wash our hands of the situation, which is the sort of less responsible tack. I want to ask you about this. The World Health Organization recently classified something called gaming disorder, which I believe is sort of related to the idea of being addicted to video games. You've written about that topic. What do we know about the idea of

being addicted to video games? Right now, it's a really tough topic because I think the research is still super preliminary. I mean, in all fairness, I think that the World Health Organization jumped the gun a little bit on diagnosing it. That, I mean, certainly, I mean, just to get this off, certainly some people are addicted to video games, that it impacts their life to such a degree

that they can't function normally. Now, again, people are addicted to all kinds of things that aren't recognized diagnoses. I mean, sex, eating, all those things aren't technical diagnoses that are recognized by, like, the American Psychiatric Association. So there can be – the question is, is it prevalent enough and does it have a big enough impact to warrant this kind of formal label? And probably the biggest study that was done on this was done out of Oxford where they examined almost 20,000 people, if I remember right. And they examined specifically the American Psychiatrics Association's definition of gaming disorder, which is very close to the World Health Organization, to see prevalence rates and what's the impact that it has on people and things of that sort. And what they found was the prevalence rate was extremely low, that people who actually had, who played video games, who had kind of impairment was around

below 1%. It was a fairly low number. Now, again, just because it's low doesn't mean it's not tragic. And so the other thing they looked at it was, well, what differentiated these people that were diagnosed with video game disorder from people who aren't? And they looked at all types of different metrics of psychological health, like, you know, how much do they go outside? How happy are they? And so forth. And what they found was actually nothing differentiated on average those people diagnosed with those who were not diagnosed, except for those who are diagnosed played video games more often. I mean, so that was definitely in their diagnosis. But there wasn't this massive on average difference between the two groups. And I think what this comes down to is right now,

we don't have good tools to diagnose this type of disorder. And the other problem is we might be misdiagnosing a lot of people with it. That especially right now, if it becomes really, if therapists are looking out for it and so forth, if a person plays a lot of video games, they might think, ah, video game addiction. And it's really important to point out too that usually when parents say, oh, my kid's addicted to video games, they do not mean their child is literally addicted to video games. They mean their kid plays it a lot, right? Because usually when they say it, they say it like rolling their eyes.

They'd never say, oh, my kid is addicted to heroin, right? Like, obviously, even they know they're using the word differently than how it's really meant to be. But so we have this issue with kind of this prevalence rate not being there and kind of a misdiagnosis that may be happening. And there's a danger in that. That's a problem if the parent who's rolling their eyes and saying, oh, yeah, my kid's addicted to video games because, you know, they played Kingdom Hearts for five hours in a row one night. Then, you know, says, well, I got to take my kid to a therapist. And the therapist said, you know, says, oh, your child has video game addiction. Like that sort of misdiagnosis could be harmful for a kid.

Well, especially if they say it in that sinister voice, then you know for sure something's wrong. Yes, I was conjuring the worst case scenario for sure. But but and you're right. And actually, there's a danger in misdiagnosis. So a lot of people say, why worry about it? But one thing that happens is exactly what you touched on is video games are so social now. If you have a kid, say, who's suffering from some other type of diagnosis, because we think a lot of times people who display symptoms of video game addiction might have another symptom that's causing them to turn to video games.

So say a child is depressed. And so in order to deal with their depression, they stay in the room and play video games all day. And while they're playing video games, though, they can talk to friends and so forth. But their parents see, oh, my gosh, why are they in the room all day playing video games? They must be addicted. Let's take this console out of their room or computer. Now they can't play anymore. Now what you have, you have a depressed kid who has completely lost all social contact with his or her friends. And so we don't know for sure.

And, again, there are some kids that it may be a legitimate issue for, but there is also going to be kids that are misdiagnosed. And so right now it's really hard. It's hard to know. I feel bad for parents who are generally concerned about their children. And I feel bad for people who are practicing because I think it is this really tough place that they're in of understanding when is a child truly addictive to video games and when is it simply this kind of going on with some other symptom or simply just overreacting to a kid doing an activity that as parents we may not approve of. It's such a, the distinctions between these things can be so subtle. Like, I just think about my own experience. You know, I've played video games for my whole life. I've had many different relationships with many different games. And, you know, there have been times where I looked back at myself playing a lot of modern games give you a super long quest list and then you go check things off the to-do

list and it feels good because you're like, I'm getting something done, right? Now, the problem is you're not getting something done in the real world. But, you know, there have been times when that checking something off of that box in the video game sort of amped me up and made me realize, oh, I could apply this to my real life. I can, you know, take this feeling and make a real life to do list and get a couple of things done in that way. Or I overcame a challenge in a game that was so tough and made me say, oh, I could, you know, I can overcome a challenge in, in my, you know, in my workplace. But then there are other times that I, looking back, I'm aware that I was replacing my, my, you was replacing my desire to accomplish

things in my life with getting something done in the video game instead. That it was more of a sort of a balming escape from that sort of world. And I was sort of sinking into it in a way that ultimately wasn't healthy. And it's hard to tell the difference in that

moment. Yeah, no, it's really tough to know that. And that's what I guess I think right now, it's way too early to be jumping on the bandwagon of creating a new diagnosis that I think simply the research is too fresh still that it's still coming out. And, you know, there's questionable research that's done, there's great research that's being done. And it's still, I think everyone's still trying to put it all together to try to understand what's really happening. But, again, from my perspective right now, I think that there's a bigger danger in kind of creating a panic around video game addiction as opposed to creating a formal category. I think it's important for people to be aware of the possibility. But right now, I don't see that as being ultimately helpful. Well, so this brings us to a bigger conversation because something that I've struggled with is how I think about new media and new technologies. know, it was the sort of post-Tipper Gore era in terms of the, you know, warning labels on music,

right? Movie ratings, video, you know, the video game panic. And my default position was, hey, this is just media. This doesn't really affect people's behavior. This doesn't really, you know, this isn't hurting. This is just old people being cranky and, you know, they need to lay off. But now that I'm older, I do think that there are ways that, you know, when I look at the way that media affects my behavior and my ideas, I look at how maybe I got a wrong idea from a piece of media that it took me a while to, you know, overcome. Or, look, I mean, look, I'm working media myself. I wouldn't be making a television show or this podcast if I didn't think that this television show or podcast were capable of changing people's

behavior for the better. And so accordingly, it must mean, hey, there must be media out there that is able to affect people for the worse as well. But then the devil becomes, how do you tell the difference between one or the other? And how do you have that conversation in a healthy way? And that's something that I've found myself struggling with. And I'm wondering as someone who researches, you know, how these things affect us for a living, if you have any insight on how I could be thinking better about this. I mean, that's a massive question.

I know it is. I'm so sorry. What a lot of it comes down to is what you're talking about is information. That's sometimes poor information. And that's definitely something we have in spades now online that there's no, you know, generally there's no editor that's checking facts anymore for blog posts or for Twitters or anything along those lines. And so you have a potential for mass information that could get out there. Now, this is different from playing a violent video game and having your brain rewired and wanting to kill people. This is an issue of not understanding something or getting wrong facts because the outlet was biased or something along those lines. And so that's a completely different issue in terms of

the potential negative effects of media. And so, I mean, media is not a savior. It's not going to save the world. I don't think it's going to doom the world either. I think it's neutral. It is what it is. It's what we as people really put into it. And so, if people put in negative stories and so forth, and people read those negative stories, and they believe those negative stories, it's going to affect them. But again, it's not also going to doom us in that if we play a violent video game, we're not suddenly going to become the next school shooter or anything along those lines, that it's simply information. And it could be the same thing with books. I mean, you know, primitive media nowadays, but books with bad information could also, you know,

create misinformation. I mean, they certainly have. Yeah. So, I mean, it's not unique. I think the difference is simply the amount of it that exists now. Yeah. So, at the very least, we can understand that we shouldn't be focusing too much on the new types of media that come out, the new technology of media that we shouldn't be saying, oh, the movies I grew up with are fine, but these new video games are causing kids to become mass shooters because really it's the content rather than the format that matters more? Or what would you say?

Yeah, I mean, and we're all going to do that. So get ready to do that at some point. We call it the Goldilocks effect. I'm going to start saying that about stuff myself. Oh, yeah. Oh, gosh, yeah. Everyone is. Everyone does as we get older. We don't know what it's going to be yet because it hasn't been invented probably for you. But we all, again, it's the Goldilocks effect.

And we tend to think the media before us, the previous generation's media, they were a bunch of stick in the muds. They were too silly. Like, oh, they were just too boring. Right. The media after us, those kids, they're crazy. They are insane. I can't stand it. My media though, that's perfect. That was just the right amount balance of kind of craziness and not being too much of a stick in the mud. And again, that's what leads to these moral panics is that every generation thinks they got it exactly right. And your generation is going to do the

same thing. And then your children's generation will do right. And your generation is going to do the same thing. And then your children's generation will do that. And their children's generation will do that. And again, that's what perpetuates this kind of moral panic that ends up happening. You know what this reminds me of is, you know, I worked at College Humor for many years. And, you know, our job was to make, you know, online sketch comedy videos, usually about topical events, right? And, you know, the name of the site is College Humor. You know, when it started, everyone there was in their early 20s. But, you know, when I was working there,

I was about 30 years old. I had just turned 30. And Snapchat had just come out. And the media narrative about Snapchat was like, oh, Snapchat is for sexting. That's all anybody uses Snapchat for. This is an app for sexting. The photos disappear, so people must be using this to send dick pics and boob pics to each other. This is the sexting app. And College Humor was like, yeah, that's what Snapchat is for. And we made a video about how Snapchat is skeevy and it's just for sexting, right? And then a month or two later, I went to a college show, you know, and the college kids picked me up from the airport. I was performing at the college and they were giving me a ride. And, um, on the way to the college, I saw them using Snapchat. They just like took a picture of a funny sign and like send it to their friend. And I was like,

oh, you guys use Snapchat? And they're like, oh yeah, we just talked to our friends all day long on Snapchat. And I realized, oh, this, it happened. It happened to us at College Humor. We were too old to understand what Snapchat was for. And we like made the mistake of falling for the moral panic and thinking that this is what everyone's just using it for their weird sex stuff. When in fact, Oh, this is just like a new form of communication that, uh, that the kids are using, uh, that is not that different from, you know, texting or whatever else we're doing. Of course, now a couple of years later, Facebook has killed Snapchat. So I'm not sure this story even makes sense anymore. But yeah, I've started to experience little hints of that Goldilocks process myself. Yeah, no, that's a great example. And like I said,

it's going to happen again and again. It'll be the next thing that you'll be convinced that people are taking dick pics with and that you don't want any part of it, that it's those crazy kids again. And again, it just continuously happens. And we see a little bit now with concerns about social media and iPhones. And like I said, it'll just, it'll, after that, it'll be something else. Yeah. So I know you've, you've been a little bit critical about anxieties over social media or the fear that overuse of social media causes suicide or things like that. Can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, the research on it is very questionable. I know you've talked to scholars in this area.

And one of the – so, I mean, there's really two parts. One part is does social media contribute to, like, depression and things of that sort? And then the much bigger issue is does it actually contribute to suicide? To kind of go backwards, to talk about the suicide link, we actually, there's basically zero evidence to suggest that other than kind of there's been this general uptick in suicides in the last 10 years, which is real. There is an uptick across all demographics. Really? I wasn't aware of that. Yeah. So in the last 10 years, but now the rub is about in the 90s, early 90s,

it's fairly comparable to what our suicide rates are now. There is actually a downtick. It's probably the better way to think about it that happened about a little past a decade ago. So this is not a historically high time for suicide. We're actually matching what we were in the 90s. Yes. If you look in the 90s, they're very similar to it, especially for adolescents. They're very similar. And one of the interesting things is even surveys examining change in happiness.

So how happy are you? Scale of 1 to 10, kind of very simple study. But it's been done continuously across time that you can find happiness levels today are almost the exact same that they were in the 90s. In fact, they're a tiny bit lower than when they were in the 90s. And again, there was that sudden surge in happiness that happened in between. So I don't know what the hell happened 10 years ago that made everyone so happy. But there was a surge and then kind of this decrease back down. So we're kind of back down to 90s level.

So again, that alone doesn't show that social media is contributing to suicide because we've had these suicide rates. And again, obviously, every suicide is tragic. So it's not as if I'm saying this is unimportant data, but it doesn't suggest in of itself that suicides rates are these historic highs because we've had them this high before, well before really social media existed. You feel this is another case of people pouncing on the new form of media and looking for reasons, you know, sort of ginning up reasons that it might be harmful? Potentially. Potentially. I think that the data is way too early to start jumping to these conclusions. That, I mean, so the data, when we look at actual studies done, I mean, there's been some really large studies done on this topic.

And one thing that's been found is that, first of all, the effect sizes, remember we talked about the light switch thing of it being a dimmer, of social media on things like saying you feel depressed and so forth is tiny. It's less than 1%. But even if you go beyond that, one thing that's been found is all these previous studies, so all the big studies that you know, all the big people you've talked to, what they've used in the past were self-reports

of how often do you use your phone? So, or how often do you use the computer? I used it for one hour today. I used it for two hours or actually it's even long. It's more retrospective than that. And what we've recently found is by careful research by a scholar named David Ellis is he found that people's actual phone use and what they think they use are completely, almost completely independent of each other. So in other words, you have no idea actually how much you use your phone. I know. When I get that notification now from Apple Screen Time, I'm like, I don't know who they've been measuring.

That's not me, man. I was on here for five minutes today. Right. But it goes both ways, too. Some people think they use it way more than they actually do. Oh, okay. It's all cattywampus. You can't predict one from the other.

That it goes, it's all cattywampus. You can't predict one from the other. And so one thing that happens is all that research that's been done before, all been based on these self-reports of screen time, which we now know aren't really accurate. So they're measuring something in those studies potentially, but it's not actual screen time. And so we don't know yet what's happening. So maybe when scholars actually use valid measurements, maybe we'll find a link. Maybe the link will even become stronger than this less than 1% link that's been found before. Or maybe it'll completely go away.

The point is, we have no idea right now. There's really no research. And that's really what defines a moral panic is our panic gets ahead of the research, that our fear of that thing, of technology, outweighs the actual research that's been done on it. And that's exactly where we're at with cell phones right now.

And specifically, when we have that fear, you know, that's a narrative in our heads. And so you're going to have researchers who are doing research that is stemming from that narrative, right? Where they say, oh, well, that narrative makes sense to me. Let me go see if it's correct. And then whatever they find, that is the research that will be boosted because the media has a preexisting, you know, predilection to it. So does that make sense? Oh, yeah. There's definitely a clickbaitness in those kinds of studies. And it's the same thing with violent video games. Like when I've done studies and we don't find links between

violent video games and media, No new study writes a story. Researchers find video games do not cause aggression. But if a researcher finds that, the headline is researchers find this or cell phones are destroying a generation. Nobody would ever say, eh, cell phones, eh, they seem okay. Like those are just not gonna fly. And that's what actually perpetuates the moral panic. It's not just researchers.

It's the media themselves. It's us as consumers of whatever the thing is. And it's also politicians. That it's all of them kind of in this kind of cycle working with each other and getting each other worked up in a panic. That's why it's so important to question those narratives that we hear because so often they're not based on research of any kind. They're just based on this thing that feels right to us that can just be, like you say, based on human nature. We have this narrative of, oh, whatever the kids like must be scary and bad. So then we are ready to believe that it's scary and bad so that we then

boost research that tentatively says it's scary and bad, even though it's too soon to really say, which feeds into this feedback cycle. And we just need to be skeptical of that in general until we really are sure that the research is there. Yeah. And it's an easy sell too, if you will, that especially for social media. So I have one of my, both my children are basically teenagers. One's almost a teenager. And I get how irritating social media is that, I mean, they're on it a lot and so forth. And of course, like, you know, I'm an old man. I'm like, oh, come on, put down your phone. Let's play ball or whatever I want to do with them. I get it's irritating. So part of me wants to go like, yes, this is evil. I got to take your

phone away because it's going to destroy you ever. It's not because I just want you to, you know, stare at me for a while or something along those lines, that it's an easy sell to parents. Because I think very often parents aren't really thrilled with their kids on their phones as much as they may be. And again, you certainly can restrict your child from their phone. There's nothing wrong with doing that. But you wouldn't restrict your child. It would be incorrect to restrict your child from the phone thinking it's going to help them lower their depression and so forth. And kind of related to that, this also shows the danger of a moral panic that you could have a case where, say, a parent is concerned that their child is exhibiting signs of depression, and they read this story that cell phones are destroying them. It's causing them to have depression. It might

cause her or him to commit suicide. And so what do you do as a parent? You grab that phone out of their hands as quick as you can, because that would be the smart thing to do from what you've read. But again, now what you've done is you simply have taken all of their social contact away. And maybe that'll be a good move to do because maybe it does cause depression. Eventually we'll get research that can show that. Or maybe that was the worst thing you could possibly do. Maybe you completely isolated that child who has depressed. The point is we just don't know yet. And it's really, really dangerous for scholars to kind of make these claims this point is, we just don't know yet. And it's really, really dangerous for scholars to kind of make these claims this early, that we just need to wait for the data

to come in until we understand it better. Well, I really appreciate you coming on to talk to us today about it, Patrick. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me. Well, thank you again to Patrick Markey for coming on the show. And thank you folks for listening. If you enjoyed the show as much as I hope you did, please leave us a rating or a review wherever you subscribe. It really helps us out a lot. I would like to thank Dana Wickens and Brett Morris at Earwolf

and our superstar researcher, Sam Roudman, as well as Andrew WK for our theme song. You can follow me at Adam Conover at Twitter or twitch.tv slash Adam Conover if you want to watch me stream video games every now and again, speaking of video games and that'll do it for this week. So see you next time on factually. That was a hate gun podcast.