As the wave of mass shootings across the United States shows no signs of abating, the narrative that video games are responsible is one that doesn’t seem to go away.  It’s a narrative that new research from Villanova University suggests is not only wrong, but discriminatory.

The research finds that people are more likely to blame video games when shootings are perpetrated by white people than by African Americans, due perhaps to the bias that more readily associates minorities with violent crime.

The findings emerged from an analysis of over 200,000 news articles about over 200 mass shootings over a 40 year period.  The analysis revealed that video games were eight times more likely to be mentioned when the shooter was white than when they were an African American male.

“When a violent act is carried out by someone who doesn’t match the racial stereotype of what a violent person looks like, people tend to seek an external explanation for the violent behavior,” the researchers explain. “When a white child from the suburbs commits a horrific violent act like a school shooting, then people are more likely to erroneously blame video games than if the child was African American.”

Violent crime

The hypothesis that violent crime is linked to violent video games is one that is widely debunked, yet politicians and media outlets continue to make the connection, even though gaming is now often the preserve of 30 somethings rather than the teenagers of old.

“Video games are often used by lawmakers and others as a red herring to distract from other potential causes of school shootings,” the researchers say. “When a shooter is a young white male, we talk about violent video games as a cause for the shooting. When the shooter is an older man or African American, we don’t.”

This didn’t just emerge via newspaper cuttings, but also in live experiments conducted by the team.  A few hundred volunteers read a mock newspaper article describing a mass shooting conducted by an 18-year old male.  The man was described as being a fan of violent video games.  For half of the volunteers, the man was shown as white, whereas the other half saw an African American shooter.

In a follow up questionnaire, people were much more likely to blame video games when the shooter was white than when they were African American.  What’s more, this was much more likely to occur among people who didn’t play video games themselves.

Dispelling the myth

The link between video games and violent crime was examined in 2015 by the APA Council of Representatives, which found that not only do 90% of children play video games in the United States, but 85% of those games contain at least some form of violence.

Whilst the research did find some link between violent video games and some aggressive behavior, there was no real evidence linking violent video games to the kind of lethal violence seen so often around the United States.  Indeed, more recent research has found even that link to be quite flimsy.

The Villanova team believe the racial undertones of this link betray a larger racial problem in the United States as it links African Americans to violent crimes more than their white peers.  If this bias pervades both society and the justice system more specifically, then it underlines the challenges African Americans still face in receiving a fair go of things.