Product placement may also leverage the audience's attitudes towards the characters to influence brand attitudes. Because product placement is not explicitly an advertisement, it may circumvent viewers' resistance to overt marketing. Such advertising is suspected of being especially effective. That is, in contrast with a self-contained advertisement presented during a commercial break, product placement attempts to change brand attitudes by making the brand part of the entertainment. In product placement, a brand or product is integrated into the entertainment media experience. Product placement is an advertising technique that attempts to harness just that process. Thus, if a violent video game makes a particular gun look attractive or rewards players' use of a particular gun, players might be expected to have more positive attitudes towards that gun following gameplay. The general learning model posits that video games can act as a learning tool, and that schema and associations learned within a game may influence behaviours and attitudes outside the game. The relationship seems, therefore, somewhat inconsistent and in need of further study.ĭespite the dearth of published research on this question, previous research and theory give us reason to expect that violent video games could influence attitudes toward firearms. However, correlations between similar predictors and similar outcomes were not statistically significant for example, violent television exposure was not significantly associated with any outcome, and the relationship between violent video game exposure and evaluations of guns fell just short of statistical significance. This latter study found a significant correlation between violent video game exposure and reduced evaluations of the seriousness and deserved punishment for playing with guns. This same report cites an unpublished study (, a non-experimental dissertation) on a modest sample ( N = 78) of adolescents. One correlational study reports that college undergraduates who have been exposed to more violent video games have more negative attitudes towards gun control legislation.
To date, little research has examined how first-person-shooter video games may influence attitudes towards firearms. In line with that suggestion, this study examined whether exposure to violent video games might foster interest in the acquisition of guns.
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They suggest that ‘research should test whether youth are more interested in acquiring and using guns after exposure to movie characters that use guns’. comment that youths exposed to smoking or drinking media characters are more likely to start smoking or drinking themselves. In their report to the National Science Foundation on what is known and what needs to be known about youth violence, Bushman et al.
Possession of a firearm is, after all, necessary to commit gun violence. One such potential antecedent is gun ownership. We conclude that, if product placement shapes attitudes towards firearms, such effects will need to be studied with stronger manipulations or more sensitive measures.Īlthough much attention has been paid to the question of whether violent video games increase aggressive behaviour, little attention has been paid to how such games might encourage antecedents of gun violence.
By contrast, gender and political party had dramatic associations with all outcomes. Attitudes towards public policy and estimation of gun safety were also not influenced by experimental condition, although these might have been better tested by comparison against a no-violence control condition. Despite collecting many outcomes and examining many potential covariates and moderators, experimental assignment did little to influence outcomes of product evaluations or purchasing intentions with regard to the AR-15. College undergraduates ( N = 176) played one of four modified video games in a 2 (gun: AR-15 or science-fiction control) × 2 (gun power: strong or weak) between-subjects design. We sought to study how the virtual portrayal of a real-world firearm (the Bushmaster AR-15) could influence players' attitudes towards the AR-15 specifically and gun ownership in general. In this study, we examined how product placement, the attractive in-game presentation of certain real-world firearm brands, might encourage gun ownership, a necessary antecedent of gun violence. Although much attention has been paid to the question of whether violent video games increase aggressive behaviour, little attention has been paid to how such games might encourage antecedents of gun violence.