Seeing causality where there is none
Nick Yee once published on his website a very interesting critique on the research methodology on most tests relating aggressive behaviors with videogames. The article is not new, but its main assertions are highly relevant and I still consider it a a must-read. Essentially, it critiques studies that survey for a relation between playing violent games and exhibiting aggressive behaviour. A researcher surveys a number of children and tests whether they like violent games and whether they are aggressive. Seeing a correlation, the researchers takes a leap of faith and states: Playing violent games leads to an aggressive behavior. And it even gets published in a renowned Psychology journal.
Now, the mistake here is to see a causality where there is just correlation. Nick Yee’s metaphor is for researchers going to a kindergarten to study the average age of its inhabitants and concluding that attending kindergarten makes you younger. Aggresive kids like violent videogames would be the right conclusion, not the other way round.
Being a long-time admirer of Yee’s work, I have many times used it to refute similarly poor tests that errouneusly infer causality relations. But this blog entry is not to bash anti-videogame research. On the contrary, I have seen the same flaw in a study in the other direction. Newspiece: Study: Surgeons who play video games more skilled.
The research queried a number of surgeons for past experience playing videogames and checked for higher performance in skill tests, seeing a correlation. I do believe that playing videogames enhances coordination, reflexes and similar. And I would love to see this article as a proof of that idea. Alas, it is not. It has the same problem as the opposite research. Just like the aggressive kids feel attracted to violent videogames, kids with high motion skills will feel attracted to the fast and difficult interaction with videogames. It would follow that, even if videogames could improve the skills of future surgeons, this study is contaminated by the noise introduced by those “higly skilled kids” that simply felt more attracted to videogames (instead of, say, TV) before they became surgeons.
The gaming world is constantly being assaulted with research that infers causality from correlation, and now we see it in the other direction. Correlation may hint the presence of causality, but does not prove it.
