Procedure

• Procedure


  Randomly allocated to one of three conditions.
• Condition 1

  played or observed an aggressive video game called Missile Command. Players had to destroy laser beams before they demolished cities. This game was rated as aggressive because of the violence towards people and objects.
• Condition 2

  played or observed a non-aggressive video game called Pac-Man. Control the character being chased around the maze by a ghost. This had a low violence rating.
• Condition 3


  played or observed paper and pen maze games based on Star Wars and Tron using a felt pen. This was the control condition.
• In the playroom there was an aggressive toy (warrior figure) and active toy (basketball set), a skill toy (pinball machine) and a quiet toy (building blocks). Experimenter in the room asked participants to play by themselves and not disturb her. She was really recording which toys children played with, in what order and how long.
• Each participants had to perform an activity to measure their level of interpersonal aggression. They were asked how they would a punish a child who was caught behaving badly and how they would reward a child caught doing something good.
• They were asked to press a buzzer to show the level of reward or punishment – how long they pressed this button was timed by the experimenter.
• The difference between the duration of the punishment and the reward buzzers was used to give the participant a score for interpersonal aggression.
• The participants were swapped around, so the first did the test and second was then observed playing.
• As a control sometimes the participant who was the player was tested first and other times it was the participant who was the observer (this is called counterbalancing).
• At the end all participants had to complete a questionnaire where the rated their experience of playing the game they had been given.