Although studies show children are highly susceptible to influence from violence in the media, college students, as well, may want to be cautious the next time they play violent video games.

Craig Anderson, professor and chairman of psychology, said the violent media college students absorbed at young ages and continue to absorb today may gradually create tendencies to become aggressive.

Anderson, who has become a leading authority on media violence through his research at Iowa State, is scheduled to give a lecture at 8 p.m. Monday in the Memorial Union about media violence and its effects on society. He has given expert witness testimony before the U.S. Senate on the negative impact of media violence and played a major role in a recent U.S. Surgeon General committee on media violence.

“You do not know when it’s happening,” said Doug Gentile, professor of psychology. “It’s a slow, long-term effect. It’s the accumulation over time, and, at that point, it feels normal or natural. We don’t feel our personalities changing.”

Anderson said this is why it is important for college students and others to become more aware of the influence of what they are watching is having on them.

He and Gentile conducted a study involving eighth- and ninth-grade adolescents, which Gentile said showed interesting results.

“The kids who were playing more violent video games saw the world as a more hostile place,” he said. “Even kids who were least naturally hostile, they were 10 times as likely to get into fights.”

Gentile said he believes the fighting tendencies may occur because once they view the world as more hostile, these adolescents may interpret a person accidentally bumping them in the hallway as someone hurting them on purpose, and, in turn, would act more aggressively toward them. The same is true for college students and adults, he said.

“It’s not like the risk stops, but adults get to choose what risks to take,” he said.

Anderson said some people may argue that killing the bad guys in a game is acceptable, because it reinforces the point that good guys win, but there are other lessons learned that develop into behaviors that society in general feels are bad.

“Video games are a perfect learning tool, and essentially what is going on is children are practicing what to do,” he said.

Despite having grown up with violence in the media, college students are less likely than others their age to become highly aggressive.

“Most college students are never going to do something seriously violent. College students have protective factors. The fact that they are in college means they are already in the top 50 percent of people,” Gentile said.

Although video games play an influential role, he said, there are many factors aside from video games that affect the development of aggressive tendencies in individuals.

“The difference between media violence and all the other risk factors for violence is that it is easily controlled,” he said. “What we find with all these kids that do really extreme things have many of these risk factors. If one is taken out, it could cause the risk to go down.”