Psychology Paper

Submitted By robjenkins11
Words: 622
Pages: 3

Violent movies and video games always seemed to take an effect one people especially now since these forms of media have better graphics and are a lot more action packed. In this experiment researchers are studying the affects these movies have on people and the likelihood of helping others, how long it would take to help, and noticing an emergency. This type of experiment is very important due to the fact that violence is seen a lot more in society and someone is need, they need help right a way. A similar study to this one is the effects of violent video games on teenager attitudes and temper. They both involve violent media and the effects it has on people. To set up this experiment, researchers had 320 college students (160 men, 160 women) to come play either a violent or nonviolent video game. The hypothesis of the experiment is that playing a violent video game would decrease the likelihood of helping, the delay of helping, decrease the likelihood of noticing an emergency, and decrease the judged severity of the emergency. The participants were all tested individually and were told they were testing what types of people like various types of video games because they didn’t want the information to be skewed. Once the participant agreed the researcher then sets a timer for 20 minutes and gives them a questionnaire to complete when the timer goes off and they’ll be back in about 40 minutes. The questionnaire was pretty lengthy and on a 10-point scale (1 = not at all, 10 = extremely) on how action packed, enjoyable, fun, arousing, boring, entertaining, exciting, involving, etc. Next after completely the survey, participants will hear an acted argument outside of their room; by the end of it the experimenter started a stopwatch to time how long it would take for participant to help the actor. By three minutes if the participant didn’t help then the researcher would come back and ask if they noticed something that happened outside because they saw someone limping down the hallway. Whether or not the participant noticed a fight was recorded and if so they were told to rate the seriousness of it. The results of this experiment supported the hypothesis; violence ratings were higher for the violent games (M = 7.89) than for the nonviolent games (M = 1.51). Within each type of video game, the researchers tested whether the four games produced different