"These studies show that violent media do indeed have an affective influence: the person may have more frequent aggressive thoughts and emotions that may increase the likelihood that they will act aggressively. Indeed, when a young person's patterns, emotions, affects, and thoughts are encoded in their memory as hostile, they will more easily - and mistakenly - interpret neutral or ambiguous information as hostile or malevolent, and may then respond violently."

This interpretation error is called "attribution bias", and takes two forms. Instrumental hostile attribution bias is when someone attributes a hostile intention to a peer's ambiguous behaviour that may have negative repercussions on their belongings or physical integrity. The relational hostile attribution bias occurs when someone attributes a hostile intention to a peer's ambiguous behaviour and this leads to problems in the subject's social relationships. Boys are more likely to exhibit the first bias (as well as aggressive physical behaviour) while girls are more likely to exhibit the second bias.   

An error in perception

In any case, given that hostile patterns caused by consumption of violent media, among other things, dominate the subject's memory, “the authors observed that the interpretation error made by aggressive children confirms their general perception of the world as malevolent," notes the psychologist. “Consequently, they view an aggressive response as legitimate." And the peer that is on the receiving end of this aggressive behaviour is also likely to attribute a hostile intention to the aggressive subject. In their eyes, the aggressive child is ill-intentioned, and they will respond to them negatively in turn. A new cycle begins, which further reinforces hostile attributions, aggressive behaviours, and social rejection. 

According to the psychologist, "the potential link between hostile attribution bias and aggressive behaviour has been studied extensively. However, few studies have tried to determine whether a violent video game can influence the player's internal state of being, and then how they interpret a situation". Kirsh's 1998 experimental study attempted to get a clearer picture of the situation. In the study, one group of 9 and 10 year-old children played a violent video game, while another played a non-violent game. The research protocol consisted in asking them to interpret images in which their peers were in ambiguous provocation situations. The results? The older the subjects and the more often they lost, the more they showed a hostile attribution bias. And this bias increased the probability that a subject who played violent video games would respond aggressively in situations of ambiguous provocation.

Testing before… and after

Roxanne Tonuitti wanted to go even further, add to this data, understand the mental processes that lead to aggressive behaviour, and see what biases or variables increased them. Since she wasn't satisfied with the conflation of violent video games and aggressive behaviour, she decided to investigate the ways in which the different elements were connected. And she focused on one of the cognitive aspects of aggressiveness, hostile attribution bias.

"Thanks to a quasi-experimental protocol (editor's note: the term quasi refers to the fact that the young people were deliberately divided into two groups, according to their level of social vulnerability), her study was able to measure the effects of the game more precisely by asking a small number of young people, boys in this case, to play a video game, and interviewing them before and after they played," explains Cécile Mathys. In fact, one of the unique aspects of this study was that it measured hostile attribution bias twice: before the children played the game, and after.