By Silas Aho, WSU Vancouver Neuroscience student
The night of May 31 2014, in a town near Wisconsin, a young girl was reportedly tied to a tree and stabbed several times by two of her classmates. The reason for this act of violence was allegedly to appease a fictional character named Slender Man from the popular videogame Slender. The victim thankfully survived and both of the girls responsible for the stabbings were taken into custody. All three of these girls were under the age of 13 yet the two involved in perpetrating the crime were tried as adults. Should they be?
abcnews.go.com
At the age of 13 an adolescent is still maturing, most notably, in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is a brain area responsible for impulse control and time management. What is more interesting is that under two different psychological evaluations both girls responsible for the crime were deemed fit to stand trial. This, in conjuncture with the ruling to be tried as adults, begs the question – how much did a video game play into committing a violent crime, and how does the brain development of preteen girls affect decision making?
The realization that these young girls were performing a ritual to a videogame character has yet again brought forth the question of how violent videogames affect children. This is a messy question, as it is very hard to test how violent a child gets after playing video games. Many of these tests would be considered unethical, as well as hard to quantify. What researchers do know is that looking at the question of violence correlated to videogames, the answer can look different depending on what angle your perspective is.
pbs.org
For instance, researchers say that aggressive tendencies are seen directly after a child plays a video game with violence, however the aggression is soon diminished, while other studies have said that learning and decision making increase with exposure to games with action such as violence in them. What’s more is that the violence seen in the games is viewed as play fighting to children and not as real world violence. An even more interesting note is the while the number of available video games has risen exponentially since their conception the rate of violent crimes among adolescents is at a 40 year low.
So what is a more plausible explanation as to why these girls were motivated to enact such a terrible crime? Dr. Steven Schlzoman explains that at the age of these girls they routinely go through something called meta-cognition. Put in simple terms it is when we find something scary and ask ourselves why we find it scary. This leads to very important developmental bench marks like becoming self-aware. However, what happened in the woods near Milwaukee is an extreme case of meta-cognition that lead these girls to act as they did on the night of May 31st. What is left to be considered is how responsible are these two girls for enacting harm onto a defenseless peer and how much brain development plays into enacting violent crimes.