Violent Video Games and Attitudes Towards Victims of Crime: An Empirical Study Among Youth

Introduction

Azjen (2005) argues that attitudes can be described as “dispositions to respond favourably or unfavourably to an object, person, institution or event” (2005, p.3). Social psychologists are interested in the impact of attitudes on behaviour and in particular the impact of attitudes of different strengths on behaviour. The MODE model of attitudes (Fazio, 1986; 1990; Fazio & Towles-Schwen, 1999) argues that attitudes are learned associations in memory and that the strength of attitudes has a bearing on their influence on our perceptions and our judgments regarding the information we process. It can be argued that the impact of video games on a person’s attitudes according to this theory could increase the accessibility of attitudes, where a person’s attitude could be easier to access due to long-term exposure to similar attitudes in video game scenes.