Press CRTT to measure aggressive behavior: The unstandardized use of the competitive reaction time task in aggression research.

Abstract

The competitive reaction time task (CRTT) is the measure of aggressive behavior most commonly used in laboratory research. However, the test has been criticized for issues in standardization because there are many different test procedures and at least 13 variants to calculate a score for aggressive behavior. We compared the different published analyses of the CRTT using data from 3 different studies to scrutinize whether it would yield the same results. The comparisons revealed large differences in significance levels and effect sizes between analysis procedures, suggesting that the unstandardized use and analysis of the CRTT have substantial impacts on the results obtained, as well as their interpretations. Based on the outcome of our comparisons, we provide suggestions on how to address some of the issues associated with the CRTT, as well as a guideline for researchers studying aggressive behavior in the laboratory.

Violent Video Games Don’t Increase Hostility in Teens, but They Do Stress Girls Out

“…Such studies often match violent and non-violent game conditions poorly introducing significant confounds [10]. Many also use unstandardized aggression outcome measures, with a demonstrated potential for false positive results [11] or which have proven difficult to replicate [12,13]. Thus, room still remains for experimental studies of youth using better methodology.…”

Manufacturing consensus in a diverse field of scholarly opinions: A comment on Bushman, Gollwitzer, and Cruz (2015).

“…Among criminologists, research exploring media violence as a potential risk factor finds little cause for concern (Felson, 1996;Messner, 1986) and reviews of risk factors for violence tend to exclude media violence as a useful predictor (Farrington & Loeber, 2002;Hawkins et al, 1998) As Bushman and Cruz stress, there are studies suggesting that exposure to violent media affect a number of responses related to aggression, from questionnaire measures to laboratory behavioral measures. There are, of course, studies that fail to find such effects, and an increasing number of alternative explanations for effects that have been found (e.g., Adachi & Willoughby, 2012;Elson, Mohseni, Breuer, Scharkow, & Quandt, 2014). Even if we assume that research studies demonstrating the effects of media violence on aggression are consistent and valid (some of us do not), media violence can then be placed among several other cues that have been found to influence similar aggression measures, such as references to weapons (Anderson, Benjamin, & Bartholow, 1998), black competition uniforms (Frank & Gilovich, 1988), words and symbols reminiscent of America (Ferguson & Hassin, 2007), and low blood glucose levels (Bushman, DeWall, Pond, & Hanus, 2014).…”

The Association between Sexist Games and Diminished Empathy Remains Tenuous: Lessons from Gabbiadini et al. (2017) and Gabbiadini et al. (2016) Regarding Sensationalism and Accuracy in Media Research

“…We are also concerned that theories in media effects are often slippery and shifting when it comes to direct effects vs. moderated mediation and what variables count as mediators as opposed to ultimate dependent variables. We worry there is a lot of analytic flexibility with existing studies (e.g., Elson et al 2014) and we suspect it is fairly easy to find at least some effect that is p < .05 (e.g., Simmons et al 2011). Collectively, these conditions make many claims about media effects difficult to falsify.…”