Media Impact

A decent idea for a research project would be to see if playing more violent videogames corresponds with a higher rate of supporting a war (i.e. Iraq or Afghanistan). I predict that this will be true, and it ties in to the cultivation theory, saying that the media distorts peoples' perceptions of the world, in this case making players think the world is full of enemies that need to be fought. A method of testing this would be to ask how frequently M-rated games are played, and see if the same group has a higher chance of supporting a war than the casual or non-gamer. Since the textbook illustrates cases where people who watch violent TV hacw greater feeling of being mugged, I wondered if the same would apply to videogames. Since videogames frequently involve shooting guns in military settings, I thought maybe this would engender sympathy with real-world military policy.