You may have heard about the amusing, er, debate between adult movie superstar Ron Jeremy and the video game industry:Violent video games have "a much bigger negative influence on kids" than pornography, a leading porn star has claimedWho's right? Neither. There are no big negative influences on today's kids, at least, none that have only recently started. Kids today are better behaved than they were 20 or 25 years ago, before any of the supposedly morally corrosive new technologies arrived to corrupt their minds: mobile phones, social networking, internet porn, violent video games...
Those are some strong claims I just made. The fear that something is very wrong in 21st century society, and that new technology has something to do with it, is widespread - whether the panic be about sexting, cyberbullying, the Facebook Generation, whatever - but the statistics tell a quite different and more positive story.
Crime rates fell, a lot, during the 1990s and have since declined a bit more, or stayed stable, in the USA (source):
In the UK, the dates are a little different but the recent drop is similar: crime rose up to the mid 1990s and then fell back down to where it started (source):
The picture is roughly the same in other industrialized countries. Bearing in mind that the vast majority of crime is committed by young people (specifically young men), this is evidence that something is not rotten in the state of today's yoof.That's in terms of how they relate to others - what about how they feel about themselves? Have rates of mental illness increased? That's a difficult one because mental illness statistics are problematic, but in terms of the body count, suicide rates in young people have declined, albeit slightly, over the same period (source US, UK).
We don't know why crime rates fell. Everyone agrees that it happened, but everyone has their own ideas as to the cause, ranging from more abortions (the "Freakonomics theory"), to less lead pollution, to cellphones making it easier to report crimes, to... I'm sure you can make up your own. Ditto for suicide.
The point is, whatever reduced them, it's unlikely that something else was acting to increase them by any significant amount over the same period. It's possible - maybe something about 21st century life causes loads of crime and suicide, but luckily, some other mystery factor(s) reduced them even more at just the right time. But that's pretty implausible; if nothing else, Occam's razor tells us not to multiply explanatory factors unnecessarily. Which means it's implausible that the internet, video games, and the rest, are causing any significant degree of harm. Which is great news. Unless you're one of those pundits who loves bad news.
16 comments:
Lead, abortion, and cell phones are probably not major determinants. This USA graph and the multiple graphs in the BBC piece reveal the main cause, and invalidate your point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2161025.stm
Those figures aren't adjusted in order to be per capita, but it makes little difference at least in the US. A caveat here is that I haven't read any academic opinion on this matter. I just looked at those data, assumed they are pretty accurate, and made an autonomous deduction, because it seems like it couldn't be any simpler.
CFS Jerk that's totally weak. There are so many possible causal explanations that picking which one(s) are appropriate and reasonable is a very difficult job. Which I think is what Neuroskeptic was getting at. Making causal associations with social phenomena is never, never, simple.
And by the way, it turns out the drop in crime is all due to the prescription of psychotropic drugs and if we prescribed more we'd stop a whole bunch of murders! (Do economists take other economists seriously?) http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15354
• “What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?” -- Plato, 4th Century BC
• “When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.” -- Hesiod, 8th century BC
• “We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self control”. -- Inscription, 6,000 year-old Egyptian tomb
• In April 1738, the press covered a report from a British Government committee which had been set up to “examine the causes of the present notorious immorality and profaneness”.
• In the 1800s, hordes of teens and pre-teens ran wild in American city streets, dodging authorities, “gnawing away at the foundations of society”, as one commentator put it. In 1850, New York City recorded more than 200 gang wars fought largely by adolescent boys.
• “Juvenile delinquency has increased at an alarming rate and is eating at the heart of America”. -- US juvenile court judge, 1946
Nah, I am more a reductionist on this matter. Games or no games, our nature will remain the same.
Those toys, be it video games or TV shows, are nothing more but a way to express your inner self.
About reducing crime rates. I have a hypothesis that underage offenders actually play less computer games than "normal population", due to alternative activities (gangs, parties), financial position (lower SES background) etc. So, I wouldn't be surprised if you find no correlation between crime rates and frequency of playing video games.
C-M: Heh, I hadn't seen that. However, the fact that the drop in the homicide & suicide rate coincides with the massive sales of SSRI antidepressants (which took off in the early 1990s) is one of the reasons why I'm skeptical of the suggested association between SSRIs and suicide/violence (although the evidence there is much stronger than the evidence implicating video games, I admit).
C-M, the same people commit felonies again and again. In the below-linked PDF you can see various felony recidivism figures for the US state of Washington, most of which are 0.50-0.80. Note also the average "rate of 3.84 past convictions per recidivist" -- I am unsure whether that number includes misdemeanors, but my guess is no. Anyway, I pulled this ref off google pretty much at random after googling [felony recidivism rates].
http://www.sgc.wa.gov/PUBS/Recidivism/Adult_Recidivism_CY04.pdf
Having these offenders in prison stops this melee. What we see in the States is a ~4x increase in per capita incarceration over 30 years, much of which results from a generous increase in sentences for repeat felons. And you don't think this is going have a giant impact, positively inevitably?
The post is making a mistake by linking the concern psychologists have over violence in all forms of media to just crime rates. You are making a sociological assertion when the research that shows the opposite is happening at the psychological level. The concern is not just behavioral, but cognitive and social as well--people exposed to violence judge violent acts more leniently, for example. It's desensitizing.
This line of research extends to behavior as well, in both adults and children. In repeated psychological studies, the use of aggression (verbal or physical) as a response to a challenge goes up whenever people were exposed to violence earlier. And, research shows the effects tend to stay. If bullying, for example, is tolerated within a classroom, then it becomes the norm.
Since we are highly desensitized to violence in our society, everyone complains about these findings--there are entire books that try to debunk the research, all written by people who are not behavioral researchers and don't know what they are talking about.
In fact the porn star is correctly stating the findings of the field, with one caveat: pornography that is violent in nature has also been linked to changes in behavior and attitudes as well.
Darrell: That's my point, though: the sociology doesn't back up the psychology. Studies may have shown that violent video games desensitize us to violence, but since the desensitization, or whatever, doesn't seem to have caused actual crime or violence, what's the problem?
C-M,
By the way, if there really are "so many possible causal explanations that picking which one(s) are appropriate and reasonable is a very difficult job" -- then why didn't you name a few that have prima facie plausibility remotely comparable to the explanation I put forward?
That would lend credence to what you say, whereas it currently lacks credence. Mere saying, you'll note, is not what I did in my post.
CFS Jerk: Hmm. Increased rates of incarceration is a possibility I've heard suggested before, albeit by (right-wing) politicians rather than academics, but maybe it's one of those ideas that's just unpalatable to academia.
However, while it's true that the same people commit crimes over and over, i.e. most crime is done by a small minority of people, we are assuming that these people are more likely to get locked up nowadays.
Maybe the increase in prison numbers is driven by people who aren't hardcore criminals (or weren't till they got locked up), like drug offenders. I'd assume that repeat offenders would have been locked up sooner or later in the 60s too. But maybe the "sooner" is the key.
Anyway, I agree it's a good candidate explanation. And if true it might undermine my point because it means that the "true" violent crime rate might be no lower, it's just that the violence is happening in prisons (con-on-con) rather than outside.
CFS Jerk, you make an interesting point, but it's also possible that high incarceration rates and low crime rates are correlated because they share a common cause. As crime in society becomes less acceptable to the general public, one would as a consequence expect both fewer criminals and harsher punishments.
CFS Jerk, what I'm saying is that mere saying is exactly what you did. Unless you have rigorously analyzed all the available data, you have no idea whether your explanation is right. Clever candidate explanation? Yes, it's definitely interesting. But, for a start, the time series don't match up if you overlay with crime rate and it looks like there is no dose-response relationship between crime rate and incarceration. Correlated? It seems so. Causal? Not on the evidence you presented. Here's my graph (at least they fit a regression): http://pipeline.corante.com/Lemongraph.jpg
Well you guys have something of a point -- I'll probably write later.
"Increased rates of incarceration is a possibility I've heard suggested before, albeit by (right-wing) politicians rather than academics"
You're not looking hard enough. There have been lots of academic studies which have affirmed that theory.
"Maybe the increase in prison numbers is driven by people who aren't hardcore criminals (or weren't till they got locked up), like drug offenders. I'd assume that repeat offenders would have been locked up sooner or later in the 60s too."
The data on drug crimes strongly argues against the idea that people are being incarcerated for drug crimes alone - they are in tandem with other crimes, often theft and violence.
TV, computer, cellphones, etc., are the tools of communication and media. These are good sources of entertainment and might also harm our health (especially optical health). Andrew Hogan said that if we focus too much on a certain object, our eyes' muscles get tired. So it means that if we are too close to TV screen or computer, the risk of having poor eyesight is high. To prevent any eye problems, it is advisable to visit your trusted optometrist. Indianapolis (IN) (my hometown), has a lot of professional and trustworthy optometrists (Indianapolis (IN)).
I had read the book titled "The Tipping Point" by Gladwell Malcolm before I found this blog site. This book is about change and it discusses the magic of word-of-mouth. Sometimes, things that we don't expect to happen come to our way anytime and it's hard to look the causes of those. Malcolm's book also discuss the surprising decrease of crime rate in New York. Maybe, one of the reasons of lowering crime rate is because people became aware when they heard crime news (maybe some panicked). Through the wide spread of news, people cooperated with police and they find ways to secure themselves. Then, it's like magic that the crime rate in New York has decreased. This is proof that word-of-mouth affects our lives, and it's like a virus that spread easily.
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