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You Shot the TV but You Were Aiming at Me (Chuck Wagon & the Wheels)

Game Theory

You might have read recently in the pages of this beloved newspaper the various claims that computer games are good for children because they increase coordination and are great for everyone because they give our brains an invigorating "cognitive workout."

Well, perhaps. But violent video games -- the kind that most people, especially teenage boys, love to play -- discourage interpersonal cooperation and promote selfishness, claim psychologists Brad E. Sheese and William G. Graziano of Purdue University. They report their findings in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Sheese and Graziano tested 48 college students, randomly assigning half to play the violent version of the popular video game Doom and half to play a less violent version. After playing the game for 25 minutes, the students participated in a task in which they had three choices: They could cooperate with a partner for mutual gain, they could refuse to participate or they could exploit their partner for their own benefit.

The psychologists found that those who played the violent version were far more likely to exploit their partner than those who played the tamer one -- "clear evidence that engaging in violent game play makes people more likely to deliberately choose to exploit their partners," they concluded.

A Vote for Unintended Consequences

So have three decades of electoral reforms had any effect on the proportion of less advantaged Americans who vote on Election Day?

Yes -- but not in the way that the advocates of reform envisioned, says political scientist Adam J. Berinsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing in the latest issue of American Politics Research.

Instead of luring the young, the poor and those with less interest in politics to the ballot box, new initiatives such as Oregon's vote-by-mail law have provoked greater participation from older, wealthier and white voters.

In a classic case of unintended consequences, Berinsky's review of all major election-law changes of the past three decades found that "reforms designed to make it easier for registered voters to cast their ballots actually increase, rather than reduce, socioeconomic biases in the composition of the voting public."

morinr@washpost.com