How low can you go?

[[R-DEV]Masaq]

Bandura's infamous "Bobo doll" experiment showed quite clearly that young children do a lot of their developmental learning about acceptable social behaviour by viewing the actions of adults and others, and then mimicing.

For those who aren't aware of the study:



Children were showed a video of an adult attacking a "bobo doll" - a giant Mr-Blobby-esque doll with a rounded base, that wobbles when you hit it.

The adult used a mallet, fists, kicks etc and would yell out phrases like "Aha! Take that!" and such (well, I'm paraphrasing...) while throwing it across the room, leaping on it and such.

The children were then taken into a room with a selection of really nice toys and told they couldn't touch them, until they became frustrated.

Then they were taken into a room with exactly the same toys and allowed to touch them. ALSO in this room was a bobo doll and a selection of the things the adult in the video had used to attack it.

88% of the children reproduced violent behaviour on the doll.

In follow-up, 8 months later, 40% of the children repeated the violent behaviour, despite having not watched the video again and not having been exposed to bobo dolls.

Children are suspecptable to learning in this way, and what's learnt at this age *can* and *will* persist, often quite heavily, into later life - even once the child has developed a "normal" sense of right and wrong.

It's why male children in households where domestic violence occurs man-on-woman are more likely to become perpetrators of domestic violence, and vicea versa, and people living in high crime rates are more likely to act aggressively than people in areas with low crime rates - even in areas of similar economic standing.

There are many many more factors that influence the course that a young child's life will take, HOWEVER, the impact of early life experiences - and in this should be included the witnessing of violent and aggressive acts even through the media - can have an effect on people.

In part, it's an inante survival requirement - each generation has to learn that violence and aggression can be a tool for survival, in nature. In society however, it is somewhat more damaging as it isn't a hapless wildebeast that gets dragged back to the cave, but more often than not is just someone trying to get along in life.

(The joys of having a mental health nurse on the forums, ey? I just lurrrrrve analysing behaviour )

[SiN|ScarFace]

All of which can be corrected with proper parenting, which is severely lacking these days. TV has become the teacher.

[puglous]

88% of the children reproduced violent behaviour on the doll.

The bobbo doll doesn't have feelings, so they had no reason not to. Heck, I'd probably punch a bobbo doll if you did that to me.

Seriously, though, people think showing killing in videogames can cause people to become aggressive, but showing heroics in videogames (which would usually be in the same videogame you showed killing in, since the vast majority of violent games force you to fight for a noble cause in which killing would be justified) doesn't cause the 1s and 0s to reach deep into our souls and pull out an inner hero? Explain to me the patterns of human physcology that explain that, please.

[ALPHA-WOLF]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]KingofCamelot

However, I can foresee a problem when you expose young children to this kind of material. Young children are far less likely to clearly see the line between reality and fantasy, which is why they tend to have imaginary friends, etc. During that time when reality and fantasy are still forming for children, I think the introduction of violent mediums can be a bad thing.

So what we are saying here is the goldfish scene from Kill Bill...

I used to play army as a kid pretending to slice my mates throat as I jumped out of the park hedge, but I have never felt the desire to do it to some complete stranger for real.
I'm not a Christian or Catholic or anything, these Morales still surrounded me, but then, so do they for all those people that do those bad things.
I used to get up in the middle of the night and watch Platoon and Nightmare On Elm Street etc when my dad was on call, but I never felt the desire to torture some other kid for fun.

Maybe there are some people out there that are just fucked in the head, and it didn't mater what book they read or film they saw, they would end up doing something undesirable to some other human being or creature anyway...

Do computer games allow humans to vent emotions so they don't do it for real, but on the other hand, does it also tap into hidden desires in people, making them desire to take it to the next level, which if they hadn't read that book or played that game, it would have never reared its ugly head...

Is a necessity that makes the human species tick?...

...
..
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So anyway lol...

what would the lowest point be, for you to see, in the pixilated world?

[[R-MOD]Wasteland]

Originally Posted by ALPHA-WOLF

Do computer games allow humans to vent emotions so they don't do it for real, but on the other hand, does it also tap into hidden desires in people, making them desire to take it to the next level, which if they hadn't read that book or played that game, it would have never reared its ugly head...

Is a necessity that makes the human species tick?...

...
..
.

So anyway lol...

what would the lowest point be, for you to see, in the pixilated world?

If somebody is displaying a pattern of escalation, I don't think that having or not having video games there will change their end-game. They'll find a substitute on the path to destruction.

It's the same flawed "gateway theory" people used to apply to marijuana and alcohol, a theory that has been discredited in many studies.

WRT the Bobo experiment, that seems a little complicated. As pointed out, it's a doll without feelings. It's a bit too great a leap IMO to apply that experiment to real life. I think that much more large scale sampling would be a better approach than experimentation for the kind of theories this study seemed designed to test.

[hoc_xfirestormx]

Originally Posted by puglous

So people have the legal right to glorify rape and the kkk in text or speech, but not in pixels?

oh no, i wasnt saying that they didnt have a right to do it. they have the right to put a kkk or rape game out if they want. but we as consumers have the RESPONSIBILITY not to buy that nonsense. in other words there is a line that has to be drawn based on intent and not necessarily content. their are movies that have rape in them, but it doesnt glorify it, so the intent is not bad. the same should go with video games.

[ArmedDrunk&Angry]

I think the point of the bobo doll is that children will follow adults behavior.

"Monkey see -Monkey do " was the phrase I was taught when I was a child.

I learned to talk because my father was a labor relations negotiator but my grandfather was more of a brawler so I will talk and talk until it's clear that won't work then I will hit you with a chair.

But like Wasteland, only if you really ask for it and there is no other viable option to stop the process.

But I would not teach that to younger people as I think it's only luck that I never seriously hurt anyone in my wilder days.

I don't think PR or any complex game really helps vent frustration, at least it doesn't for me as I don't play game when I'm truly angry because games are for fun and being angry doesn't equate with fun for me.


The kid that chased KoC around, was aping the behavior he saw his older brother doing and if he had a stable adult male figure in his life he would imitate that behavior.

So to some extent perhaps the games and TV/movies do have an effect on the children of single mothers as the child may use game/movie/TV characters as his model for behavior.
Monkey see- monkey do and what do we see on non-fictional TV ? OJ and Michael Vick and Fitty Sent.... not the best role models.

When was the last time a strong moral upstanding citizen was highlighted by the media, the mainstream media ?

[hoc_xfirestormx]

Originally Posted by SiN|ScarFace

All of which can be corrected with proper parenting, which is severely lacking these days. TV has become the teacher.

...so youre saying that the people who learned from their parents to not care about their kids at all should somehow awaken and become good parents... somehow? i hate this "where are the parents? the parents should do it!" attitude that so many people have. if the parent's parents were inept, then these parents will most likely be inept too, since thats the only way they know how to be. put in a bit of racism, classism, and take away any future that people may have and you have yourself a hopeless situation! yaaayyyy. and what do people do when they have no hope, future, or potential? crime. so the argument basically boils down to: "well its the parents fault! we have proven that values and morality are products of nurture rather than nature and we can easily apply that to the lower class, but f*ck that! they should be the exception to the rule! 400 years of racism and oppression shouldnt affect their parenting skills or social behavior!". its very easy to say that from a nice neighborhood safe from all the poor bad parents' kids and turn this issue into black and white with no gray area. empathizing is much harder.

i say we are all in this together and it is all of our faults when someone resorts to crime. for every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction -- if no one cares about poor people, they arent going to care about anyone.

i understand that there is such a thing as a moron, and these people can multiply and just be bad parents because they just suck in general, but all im saying is that isnt the case all the time. there isnt a plague of bad parenting affecting all these people for no reason.

[[R-MOD]Wasteland]

And I hate this attitude of social determinism. You are the one truly making the classist argument here, suggesting that the poor are incapable of free will and bettering their own situation.

My grandfather was born to poor German immigrant farmers. He didn't learn to speak English (though he lived in Canada all his life) until high school. He was constantly in fights because he was "a kraut". Then WWII came around and he volunteered and served in Italy and the Netherlands as a tank commander, fighting and killing Germans. When he got back he worked the rest of his life in a Ford factory, working 80 hours a week, every week of his working life, in order to support his wife and 6 kids, one of whom was my dad.

None of my dad's ancestors has held professional or intellectual jobs, but my dad got a 4.0 in high school and put himself through university on scholarships and a landscaping company he created. When he got out he became a field engineer in an oil company, where he's now a high level executive. He was also beaten regularly as a child, though he never showed a single emotional scar from it while bringing me up.

People can damn well act of their own volition. To suggest otherwise is to refuse them the respect they deserve.

[SiN|ScarFace]

Originally Posted by hoc_xfirestormx

...so youre saying that the people who learned from their parents to not care about their kids at all should somehow awaken and become good parents... somehow? i hate this "where are the parents? the parents should do it!" attitude that so many people have. if the parent's parents were inept, then these parents will most likely be inept too, since thats the only way they know how to be. put in a bit of racism, classism, and take away any future that people may have and you have yourself a hopeless situation! yaaayyyy. and what do people do when they have no hope, future, or potential? crime. so the argument basically boils down to: "well its the parents fault! we have proven that values and morality are products of nurture rather than nature and we can easily apply that to the lower class, but f*ck that! they should be the exception to the rule! 400 years of racism and oppression shouldnt affect their parenting skills or social behavior!". its very easy to say that from a nice neighborhood safe from all the poor bad parents' kids and turn this issue into black and white with no gray area. empathizing is much harder.

i say we are all in this together and it is all of our faults when someone resorts to crime. for every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction -- if no one cares about poor people, they arent going to care about anyone.

i understand that there is such a thing as a moron, and these people can multiply and just be bad parents because they just suck in general, but all im saying is that isnt the case all the time. there isnt a plague of bad parenting affecting all these people for no reason.

Who is supposed to teach you? Society? Or the people who created you? The latter.
All people are responsible for their own choices. If you make a poor choice, you are responsible for it. If you have crappy parents and you become a crappy parent, both generations made poor choices. You can blame society for it and take the easy way out and over analyze it to death, but the root will always be your own choices. If you are too weak to make a good choice that just means you are weak, but people like you will blame it on ZXY, even tho the choice was made by that individual. That person might have been influenced by XYZ but they still made the choice to do it. People love to blame things and others for their actions. If you can't control yourself that is your fault. If you do something because peers pressured you to, you are weak.
If you make poor choices with full knowledge of the risk and can admit to that, that is better than blaming others for why you did it. Excuses only show you can't handle the responsibly of choice.
People are capable of breaking the cycle of poor choices, just like you can lose weight, get off drugs, get a job, ect. People can get out of the ghetto, can choose not to be like their poor parents. It does not take much time on this earth to comprehend the golden rule and apply it, IF YOU SO CHOOSE.