Tobias Greitemeyer Summary

1 Summary of Hypothesis

In this paper, Tobias Greitemeyer recalls previous articles showing thatplayingvideogamesareassociatedwithanincreaseinplayer’s aggressivebehavior. Greitemeyeralsostatesthateventhoughthere is proof of these correlations, if one would casually ask an avid gamer, they would deny these claims. Greitmeyer argues that the player’s behavior in a video game compared to their actions in real life creates a discrepancy in the violent video game debate. Furthermore, Greitemeyer proposes that because of the severity of the violence in certain video games, the player’s perception of aggression may be different than the societal norms. Greitemeyer then states that he conducted two separate experiments to test if his two theories were

Forthefirstexperiment, theparticipantswere tasked with playing a violent video game or a neutral one. From there, the participants were assessed on a Likert type scale, and answered various questions in regards to their mood, using the seven point scale. Afterwards to measure the perception of daily life aggressive behavior, Greitemeyer adapted a procedure created by another group of researchers. The participants were given fifty two aggressiveactionsthatwouldeitherbeactedoutbyothersorthemselves. From there, the participant would then rank the action dependingonhowaggressivetheythoughttheactionwas. Forthesecondexperiment,Greitemeyermainlywantedtoreplicatetheresults of experiment one and also see if a biased view of what aggressive behavior is considered would possibly account for increased aggression after playing a violent video game. For the first part of the second experiment, Greitemeyer switch the games used for the violent and neutral portion. In order to measure the aggression levels intheparticipantsforthesecondportionoftheexperiment,participantswereaskedtotastehotsauceanddecidehowmuchhotsauce they would taste, as well as the rest of the participants. Based on theamountofhotsaucesuggestedbytheparticipant,theaggression level of the participant would be calculated into the