Stetson professor: Video games do not cause violence

On Monday, President Donald Trump referenced "gruesome and grisly video games" in addressing last weekend's mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, in which 32 people were killed and another 50 people were injured. 

[STETSON STUDY: No link between video games and violence]

[ALSO: Stetson prof dismisses WHO theory on video game addiction]

Trump's words triggered the phone of Chris Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Stetson University.

Through his research of violence, video games and media effects for 15 years, Ferguson has shown again and again there is no correlation. And he doesn't shy away from being a media go-to guy.

"I blame Trump for completely absorbing my Monday and a good portion of my Tuesday. From 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. (Monday) I barely left my study, talking to news reporter after news reporter," Ferguson told The News-Journal in a half-hour interview Tuesday. "My wife was kind enough to bring me water and meals between interviews."

In linking violence with video games, Trump was not alone. There is a long, bipartisan history of blame, although lately Republicans seem to be carrying on the tradition. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick were among elected officials who cited video games as part of the problem in recent days.

And there was Ferguson, in the pages of The New York Times, making an analogy about video games and violence.

"The data on bananas causing suicide is about as conclusive," Ferguson said. "Literally. The numbers work out about the same."

In all, he did about 12 interviews on Monday and at least five more on Tuesday — including PBS, NBC, CBC and Yahoo! Finance.

Advocating research

Ferguson, a 48-year-old husband and father, was described in an earlier News-Journal story as "a media violence crusader 'wolf' dressed in scholarly sheep's clothing," by Tim Winter of the Parents Television Council. He laughs at that description and offers a "moment of defensiveness," pointing to his academic credentials, his peer-reviewed research and his independence from the video-game or media industry as a tenured professor.

Janie Graziani, assistant vice president for marketing communications at Stetson, said Ferguson is one of the best experts in the world when it comes to violence in the media, and he's in high demand because of it.

"One of the great things about professors: Apart from being scientists, they are teachers," Graziani said. "One of the things they love to do is educate the public."

His advocacy is not for a particular brand of politics, but for the broadening of knowledge from his research.

"Science, I don't think, is terribly valuable unless you find a way to communicate it to the general public," Ferguson said. "To the extent that science is meaningful for how people live their lives, whether it's climate change, people making decisions on whether or not to vaccinate their kids or video games, it is important for us to get out there and talk about what the science is and point people to the research so they can read it and make up their own minds."

It's not just this week that Ferguson has chimed in on the issue.

In 2013, he wrote an opinion piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Few studies actually examine violent behavior as outcomes, and those that do are least likely to find evidence for negative effects," he wrote. "In my own research, I find no evidence that video games or television contribute to youth violence, dating violence, bullying, or adult arrests."

He raised the point that youth growing up in other countries, Canada, the Netherlands and South Korea, consume as much violent media as American children, but have much less violent crime, even non-gun violence.

While some mass shooters have played violent video games, so have a large percentage of non-mass shooters. And some of the most notorious mass killers, including Adam Lanza of the Sandy Hook school murders and Seung-Hui Cho of the Virginia Tech slayings, preferred non-violent games like "Dance Dance Revolution" and "Sonic the Hedgehog."

Ferguson has made these and other points in his own PBS News Hour piece, and detailed in a The Atlantic piece how concern about violence in media led to mixed results among researchers in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1993 and 1994, concern had reached the U.S. Senate.

Following the Columbine High School mass shootings 20 years ago, and a string of games featuring better graphics and more violent content, such as "Grand Theft Auto," and "Call of Duty," Sen. Hillary Clinton proposed legislation in 2005 aimed at curbing minors' access to violent video games.

"At that time, there was almost no pushback from anything outside of the gamer community," Ferguson said. "Now, you know, the president makes these statements and outside of other politicians in his own party, it seems like almost everybody doesn't like it."

Clinton demonstrated that change in thinking on Monday, chiming in on Twitter: "People suffer from mental illness in every other country on earth; people play video games in virtually every other country on earth. The difference is the guns."

Such a transformation in thinking has come gradually, and through the combination of research and advocacy.

Ferguson, a member of the American Psychological Association, played a role in that organization's own position.

As late as 2015, the APA put out a position paper suggesting video games can be linked to aggressive behavior, if not outright violence.

"That was controversial," Ferguson said.

Two years later, in 2017, Ferguson chaired the News Media, Public Education and Public Policy Committee of APA, which issued a report stating, in part: "Journalists and policy makers do their constituencies a disservice in cases where they link acts of real-world violence with the perpetrators’ exposure to violent video games or other violent media. There’s little scientific evidence to support the connection, and it may distract us from addressing those issues that we know contribute to real-world violence.”

Causes of violence

So if not exposure to violence in media, what factors contribute to a person's descent into mass murder?

"The reality is what causes one person to engage in criminal violence may be different from another," Ferguson  said. "A common thread at the individual level includes genes ... usually mixed with a harsh family environment."

Certain types of mental-health issues, such as schizophrenia or depression, can elevate risks among certain individuals, but societal factors can also come into play: income inequality and equality of policing.

"Countries with better — less corrupt — police forces tend to have less violence," he said. "The other thing we see with homicide, specifically, is access to firearms."

Research shows that the United States, with its easy access to guns, has a very high homicide rate, but it doesn't have a high assault rate, Ferguson said.

The divide over the Second Amendment and gun-reform proposals has drawn the video-game-to-blame narrative onto the right-wing side. "I think for some politicians on the right, it's become a convenient distractor from the discussion about gun control and maybe things like income inequality that they may not want to talk about," Ferguson said.

The debate becomes about video games for a day or two, then the news cycle moves on.

Come Aug. 22, when classes resume at Stetson's DeLand campus, Ferguson will be out of the media spotlight and back in the classroom for three classes. His work on research continues to take up the bulk of his time, even when he's teaching.

Ferguson, who grew up in Rhode Island, made it to Florida, enrolling at Stetson, by age 20. He switched from engineering because "it didn't excite me," like psychology did. Ferguson was inspired by "The Silence of the Lambs," intrigued with serial killers and other aspects of human behavior.

Mainly, for him, it was fun: "We get to talk about sex and violence all the time."

Chris Ferguson, a Stetson University professor of psychology, researches media effects and violence. And when he’s not doing that or teaching, he gets in an occasional video game. Here are five of his favorites of all time:

• “Assasin’s Creed Odyssey”

•“Alice: Madness Returns”

• The “Civilization” series

• Some of the “Dungeons & Dragons” games of the 1990s

• “Defender”

Chris Ferguson's favorites