Stanford prison experiment researcher says porn and videogames are turning boys into ‘arousal addicts.’ Crickets chirp.
Before you can do something great, you must first do something. Dr. Phillip Zimbardo seems to have reverse this aphorism, having done something great very early in 1971 when he led the Stanford prison experiment, a monumental example of how powerfully affected by environmental context human morality is. Zimbardo’s most recent work isn’t great, but it certainly is something.
He is the co-author, along with psychologist Nikita Duncan, of a new book The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About it. In an editorial to promote the book on CNN, Zimbardo and Duncan lay out the case for their book, claiming that videogames and internet porn exploit the pleasure centers of young boys’ brains and lead to a warping “arousal addiction.”
Young men — who play video games and use porn the most — are being digitally rewired in a totally new way that demands constant stimulation. And those delicate, developing brains are being catered to by video games and porn-on-demand, with a click of the mouse, in endless variety.
Such new brains are also totally out of sync in traditional school classes, which are analog, static and interactively passive. Academics are based on applying past lessons to future problems, on planning, on delaying gratifications, on work coming before play and on long-term goal-setting.
Guys are also totally out of sync in romantic relationships, which tend to build gradually and subtly, and require interaction, sharing, developing trust and suppression of lust at least until “the time is right.”
To support the case, the duo refer to a grim list of anecdotes, including Anders Behring Brevik’s affection for World of Warcraft and Call of Duty (even though he testified his gaming interests had nothing to do with his killings). There’s also mention of the South Korean man, Seungseob Lee, who died from cardiac arrest after playing StarCraft for 50 hours. And a subject of a True Life episode on MTV who was so addicted to internet porn that his wife threw him out and he grew alienated from the four children.
There’s also mention of a CDC study that finds frequent users of online porn more likely be depressed and the Annual Review of Public Health’s suggestion that playing violent games sometimes produce heightened aggression and irritability. These are self-evidently anecdotal and inconclusive, so we can treat any conclusions drawn from them as speculative and incomplete.
Where Zimbardo and Duncan dramatically overstate the evidence about addictiveness, they do have a reasonable point about Western culture’s exploitation of sex and titillation to get people to participate in things that would otherwise be meaningless. Axe sells deodorant on the basis that it will get the wearer women, true love is equated with the size of a diamond a person gets from Zales, and people stick with awful jobs like handing out fliers in giant animal costumes because a need for money over dignity and true usefulness. Credit card companies gamify their rewards systems to keep people spending money on inessentials.
There’s no good evidence to suggest we are becoming degraded addicts because of all the new forms of stimulation and consumption we’ve built our society around. But there’s plenty to say about the false values and exploitive commercial relationships that define the west today. There’s still plenty of room left for someone to do something great on that subject.
