It is human nature to believe that you are less susceptible to being fooled than anyone else. Many people believe themselves to be practical, logical, and unbiased. Karen Sternheimer, the author of “Do Video Games Kill,” and world renowned positive psychologist Dan Gilbert, the author of “Immune to reality” challenge this idea. Karen Sternheimer used “Do Video Games Kill,” to show the underlying nature of human psychology. “The video game explanation constructs the white, middle-class shooters as victims of the power of video games, rather than fully culpable criminals. White, middle-class killers retain their status as children easily influenced by a game, victims of an allegedly dangerous product. African-American boys, apparently, are simply dangerous.”17 While biologically the same, the psychological notion that white teen killers are victims and black killers are simply evil is depicted in the media. If one is unbiased they …show more content…
After all, there was millions of Doom players and the vast majority did not shoot up schools. In addition, Sternheimer notes that, “in the ten years following Doom’s release, homicide arrest rates fell by 77 percent among juveniles.”13 By the same token, much of the studies done on children and violence were flawed. For example, Sternheimer wrote about a 2001 article that said video games “will increase aggressive behavior.”15 “But their research was based on college undergraduates, not troubled teens, and it measured aggression in part by subjects’ speed in reading ‘aggressive’ words on a computer screen or blasting opponents with sound after playing a violent video game.”15 This research is clearly flawed