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Social Psychological and Personality Science
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DOI: 10.1177/1948550614528008
published online 20 March 2014Social Psychological and Personality Science
Grace S. Yang, Bryan Gibson, Adam K. Lueke, L. Rowell Huesmann and Brad J. Bushman
Effects of Avatar Race in Violent Video Games on Racial Attitudes and Aggression
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Article
Effects of Avatar Race in Violent Video
Games on Racial Attitudes and Aggression
Grace S. Yang
1
, Bryan Gibson
2
, Adam K. Lueke
2
,
L. Rowell Huesmann
1
, and Brad J. Bushman
3,4
Abstract
The media often link Black characters and violence. This is especially true in video games, in which Black male characters are
virtually always violent. This research tested the effects of playing a violent game as a Black (vs. White) avatar on racial stereotypes
and aggression. In Experiment 1, White participants (N¼126) who played a violent video game as a Black avatar displayed
stronger implicit and explicit negative attitudes toward Blacks than did participants who played a violent video game as a White
avatar or a nonviolent game as a Black or White avatar. In Experiment 2, White participants (N¼141) who played a violent video
game as a Black (vs. White) avatar displayed stronger implicit attitudes linking Blacks to weapons. Implicit attitudes, in turn, related
to subsequent aggression. Black violent video game avatars not only make players more aggressive than do White avatars, they
also reinforce stereotypes that Blacks are violent.
Keywords
violent video games, implicit racism, prejudice, African American, Black, aggression
The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the
power to make theinnocent guilty and to makethe guilty innocent,
and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.
Malcolm X
By frequently linking Black characters with violence, the
media have the power to perpetuate the stereotype that Blacks
are violent individuals. This stereotype may be more prevalent
in video games than in any other form of media because being a
Black character in a video game is almost synonymous with
being a violent character (e.g., Burgess, Dill, Stermer, Burgess,
& Brown, 2011). Further, exposure to Black video game char-
acters has been shown to negatively influence players’ subse-
quent judgments of an unrelated Black individual (Dill &
Burgess, 2012). No research, however, has examined how vio-
lent video games with Black avatars affect attitudes toward
Blacks in general. As video game graphics have improved,
game developers can now create realistic avatars that vary on
a number of dimensions, including race. Recent research has
shown that the avatar played by a gamer can have important
effects on gamer outcomes. For example, one study found that
participants who played a violent video game as an avatar of
their own design were more aggressive than those playing an
avatar assigned to them (Hollingdale & Greitemeyer, 2013).
The current research focuses on how avatar race can affect
gamers. Given the prevalent stereotype that Blacks are violent
(Devine, 1989; Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie, & Davies, 2004;
Payne, 2001), we propose that playing a video game in a
violent way as a Black avatar can reinforce and increase these
stereotypes. Playing the game in a nonviolent way, however, is
unlikely to have negative effects, as the player is not witnessing
(or causing) the Black avatar to act in a stereotypic, violent
way. Likewise, playing a violent video game as a White avatar
should not reinforce or increase violent stereotypes of Blacks.
There are theoretical reasons to make these predictions.
Exposure to a specific race that is presumed to be associated
with violence and aggression (i.e., Blacks) should activate the
existing negative stereotypes that Blacks are characteristically
more aggressive and violent than other racial groups. Exposure
to a violent stimulus related to an avatar’s Black race should
increase the accessibility of aggressive cognitions in memory
stereotypical of that race (e.g., ‘‘Black men are violent,’’
‘‘Black men are dangerous’’). Such increased accessibility of
negative beliefs about Black people may also activate other
semantically related thoughts, feelings, and behavioral tenden-
cies (Berkowitz, 1990), leading to more negative attitudes
1
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
2
Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI, USA
3
The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
4
VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Corresponding Author:
Brad J. Bushman, The Ohio State University, 3127 Derby Hall, 154 North Oval
Mall, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Email: bushman.20@osu.edu
Social Psychological and
Personality Science
1-7
ªThe Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1948550614528008
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toward Blacks. Furthermore, by playing a game violently as a
Black avatar the associations between race and aggression may
be strengthened through evaluative conditioning (Walther,
Weil, & Dusing, 2011). Some research has shown that preju-
dice can be reduced through evaluative conditioning processes
(Olson & Fazio, 2006). We suggest that pairing a stereotyped
group member with stereotypical behavior could strengthen
prejudiced attitudes through evaluative conditioning.
We examine both implicit and explicit attitude measures.
Implicit attitudes are thought to be primarily associative in
nature (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). The Implicit Asso-
ciation Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998)
provides a measure of the association between racial categories
and positive and negative concepts and has been shown to be
sensitive to priming and evaluative conditioning. In one study,
for example, exposed some participants to positive Black
exemplars (e.g., actor Denzel Washington) and negative White
exemplars (e.g., serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer), whereas others
were exposed to negative Black exemplars (e.g., boxer Mike
Tyson; Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001) and positive White
exemplars (e.g., actor Tom Hanks). The results showed that
participants exposed to positive Black and negative White
exemplars showed less negative implicit attitudes toward
Blacks than did participants exposed to negative Black and
positive White exemplars. We propose that playing a violent
video game as a Black avatar will provide exposure to
stereotype-consistent violent actions, thus priming and
strengthening those negative associations. Thus, we predict that
playing a violent video game as a Black avatar will lead to
more negative implicit attitudes toward Blacks.
Explicit negative attitudes about Blacks should also be
altered by exposure to stereotype-consistent actions in the
video game. Witnessing (and in fact, causing) such actions
when playing a violent game as a Black avatar should increase
access to memories of violent actions by Blacks and conse-
quently should enhance the encoding of explicit negative atti-
tudes about Blacks. This should lead players to alter their
explicit judgments of Blacks to be more negative.
Playing violent video games as a Black avatar should not
only influence attitudes toward Blacks, it should also influence
aggressive behavior above the effect of simply playing a vio-
lent video game. This is because the activation of implicit
‘‘Blacks are violent’’ stereotypes is hypothesized to lead to
more aggressive behavior and because playing as a violent
Black avatar should directly prime aggressive thoughts, feel-
ings, and behavioral tendencies in memory, which should
increase the likelihood of aggressive behavior (Berkowitz,
1990). Previous research has shown that stereotype activation
can lead to the implementation of stereotype-consistent beha-
vior (e.g., Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Galinsky, Wang,
& Ku, 2008; Wheeler, Jarvis, & Petty, 2001). Thus, activating
stereotypes that Blacks are violent and dangerous should
increase subsequent aggressive behavior. Previous research has
consistently shown that violent video games can increase
aggressive behavior (Anderson et al., 2010). In addition, other
research suggests that watching a Black video game avatar
increases accessibility to violent constructs (Burgess et al.,
2011). No previous research, however, has examined the
effects of avatar race in violent video games on aggression.
We predict that playing a violent video game as a Black avatar
will also increase aggression more than playing the same vio-
lent game as a White avatar.
Overview
The present research explored the consequences of playing a
violent video game as a Black avatar on the implicit and expli-
cit attitudes (Experiments 1 and 2) and on the aggressive beha-
viors (Experiment 2) of White participants.
Experiment 1
Experiment 1 provides an initial test of the hypothesis that
playing a violent video game as a Black avatar increases both
implicit and explicit negative attitudes toward Blacks. White
participants were randomly assigned to play a video game with
an objective that did or did not require violence to complete, as
a Black or White avatar. After playing the game, participants
completed measures of implicit and explicit negative attitudes
toward Blacks. We predicted that both implicit and explicit
attitudes toward Blacks would be most negative for participants
playing a violent game as a Black avatar.
Method
Participants
Participants were 126 White university students (60%males)
who received extra credit. No effects were found for participant
sex in either experiment, so we do not mention it further.
Procedure
Participants were told that the researchers were studying the
relation between video game skills, personality, and reaction
time. After giving their consent, participants played Saints Row
2for 20 min on a Playstation 3 video game console that was
connected to a 42 00 (106.7 cm) high-definition JVC television.
Saints Row 2 is similar to the popular Grand Theft Auto series,
but the avatar’s clothing, race, and other characteristics can be
varied. Participants were randomly assigned to play the game
as either a Black or White male avatar. Clothing and build were
held constant across conditions. Other features, however, were
manipulated in stereotype-consistent ways. These included
manipulations of physiological features (skin color and facial
features), English usage (the Black avatar used a stereotypical
inner city dialect), and hairstyle (cornrows for the Black avatar
and a short, conservative style for the White avatar). Prior to
the participants’ arrival at the experiment, the experimenter set
up the game with the appropriate avatar and rotated the game
view, so that the avatar was seen face on by the participant
when he or she started playing. To play the game, the partici-
pant had to alter the perspective of the video representation
2Social Psychological and Personality Science
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such that the screen showed the back of the avatar in a typical
‘‘third-person’’ orientation. Although the facial features of the
avatar were not visible during gameplay, the hairstyle and skin
tone were constant reminders of avatar race.
Participants were also assigned randomly to play the
game with a violent or nonviolent goal. In the violent con-
dition, participants were told the goal was to break out of
prison, which required them to kill many guards. Partici-
pants who completed the prison break before 20 min
elapsed were given a chance to explore the city. In the non-
violent condition, participants were told that the goal was to
find a chapel somewhere in the city and that they should
avoid harming others during gameplay. Participants who
found the chapel before 20 min elapsed were given a second
goal (find ‘‘Club Koi’’). Thus, the design was a 2 (Black vs.
White Avatar Race) 2 (Violent vs. Nonviolent Gameplay)
between-subjects factorial design.
To measure implicit negative attitudes about Blacks, partici-
pants completed the race IAT in which photos of White and
Black males and females are paired with ‘‘good’’ words (e.g.,
wonderful, glorious, happy) or ‘‘bad’’ words (e.g., terrible, hor-
rible, evil). The photos and words were those used in the race
IAT at the Project Implicit website. Slower responses to the
‘‘White/Bad’’ and ‘‘Black/Good’’ pairings than to ‘‘White/
Good’’ and ‘‘Black/Bad’’ pairings are considered to be indica-
tive of more negative attitudes about Blacks than Whites. IAT
scores were calculated using the Dmethod (Greenwald, Nosek,
& Banaji, 2003). Dis calculated by comparing the average
response latency for one block of trials to the average response
latency for the other block, adjusted for the pooled standard
deviation (SD) across blocks. Latency for error trials are
removed and replaced with the block average plus a 600-ms
penalty for the incorrect response.
To measure explicit negative attitudes about Blacks, partici-
pants also completed the 8-item Symbolic Racism 2000 Scale
(e.g., ‘‘It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard
enough; if Blacks would only try harder they could be just as
well off as Whites’’; Cronbach’s a¼.66; Henry & Sears,
2002). A debriefing followed.
Results
Explicit Negative Attitudes About Blacks
A 2 (Black vs. White Avatar Race) 2 (Violent vs. Nonviolent
Gameplay) found the predicted interaction, F(1, 122) ¼3.90,
p< .05. A planned contrast confirmed that participants who
played the game violently as a Black avatar had stronger expli-
cit negative attitudes toward Blacks (M¼19.2, SD ¼2.3) than
did participants in the other conditions (M¼17.8, SD ¼3.1),
t(122) ¼2.59, p¼.02, d¼0.47 (see Figure 1). More specifi-
cally, in the violent gameplay condition, those who played as a
Black avatar had stronger explicit negative attitudes toward
Blacks than did those who played as a White avatar (M¼
17.8, SD ¼3.3) t(122) ¼1.95, p< .054, d¼0.35. Neither main
effect was significant, Fs < 2.5, p’s > .12.
Implicit Negative Attitudes About Blacks
A 2 (Black vs. White Avatar Race) 2 (Violent vs. Nonviolent
Gameplay) revealed no significant effects, p’s > .15. Planned
contrasts, however, showed that participants who played the
violent version of the game as a Black avatar were more likely
to associate Black faces with negative words on the IAT (M¼
0.48, SD ¼0.40) than were participants in the other conditions
(M¼0.32, SD ¼0.33), t(117) ¼2.19, p< .04, d¼0.40 (see
Figure 1). More specifically, in the violent gameplay condition,
those who played as a Black avatar were more likely to associ-
ate Black faces with negative words on the IAT than did those
who played as a White avatar (M¼0.30, SD ¼0.36) t(117) ¼
2.01, p< .05, d¼0.37.
Discussion
Playing a violent video game as a Black avatar increased both
implicit and explicit negative attitudes toward Blacks. Partici-
pants who played the violent version of the video game as a
Black avatar had stronger associations between Blacks and
negative constructs, and had higher symbolic racism scores,
compared to all other participants and compared to participants
who played the violent version of the game as a White avatar.
Experiment 2
Experiment 2 extends Experiment 1 by showing that playing a
violent video game as a Black avatar (compared to playing as a
White avatar) specifically increases Whites’ attitudes about
Blacks being violent. Experiment 2 also shows that playing a
violent video game as a Black avatar (compared to playing as
a White avatar) influences players to behave more aggressively
Figure 1. Explicit negative attitudes about Blacks for participants who
played a nonviolent or violent video game as a White or Black avatar.
Capped vertical bars denote 1 SE.SE ¼standard error.
Yang et al. 3
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after the game. In addition, we used different operational defi-
nitions of our key variables to enhance the generalizability of
results. We also excluded the nonviolent game play condition
in Experiment 2 because avatar race did not significantly affect
explicit or implicit negative attitudes in players of the nonvio-
lent game (see left-hand side of Figures 1 and 2).
Method
Participants
Participants were 141 White university students (65%female).
Procedure
After informed consent was obtained, participants were ran-
domly assigned to play a violent game as either a Black or
White male avatar. To increase the generalizability of find-
ings (Wells & Windschitl, 1999), two violent games were
used: (1) the wrestling game WWE Smackdown vs. RAW
2010 and (2) the boxing game Fight Night Round 4.
1
As in
Experiment 1, both games also use a third-person perspective,
allowing the player to see the avatar’s race throughout game-
play. Both these games have been rated at the highest level of
violence by the Entertainment Software Rating Board and by
a set of independent raters (Boxer, Huesmann, Bushman,
O’Brien, & Moceri, 2009).
One of the most prevalent stereotypes about Blacks is that
they are violent individuals (Devine, 1989; Eberhardt et al.,
2004; Payne, 2001). Thus, in Experiment 2, we used an implicit
measure of this stereotype. After playing the video games, par-
ticipants completed a race-weapons IAT (Nosek et al., 2007),
in which photos of Black and White male and female faces
were paired with photos of weapons (e.g., gun, hand grenade)
versus harmless objects (e.g., cell phone, camera).
Next, participants completed what they thought was a differ-
ent study on ‘‘food preferences’’ with an ostensible partner of
the same sex. Both individuals indicated the foods they liked
and disliked on a form, including spicy foods like hot salsa, and
exchanged forms with their ‘‘partner.’’ The ‘‘partner’’ gave the
spicy foods the lowest possible rating (i.e., 1 ¼strongly dislike,
on a 5-point scale). Through a rigged lottery, each person chose
a food item for his or her partner from papers in a hat, and the
participant always chose a paper that said ‘‘hot sauce.’’ The
participant was told that each person must eat all the food in
order to provide an accurate evaluation of the food item. Parti-
cipants first tasted the hot sauce themselves and then decided
how much hot sauce to give their partner. The amount of hot
sauce the participant chose for the ‘‘partner’’ was used to mea-
sure aggression (Lieberman, Solomon, Greenberg, & McGre-
gor, 1999). A debriefing followed.
Results
Implicit Attitudes Linking Blacks to Weapons
As expected, participants who played a violent game as a Black
avatar were more likely to associate Black faces with weapons
on the IAT (M¼0.61, SD ¼0.53) than were participants who
played as a White avatar (M¼0.39, SD ¼0.35), t(137) ¼2.83,
p< .005, d¼0.48.
Aggression
As expected, participants who played a violent game as a Black
avatar gave their ‘‘partner,’’ who disliked spicy food, 115%
more hot sauce (M¼0.062 g, SD ¼0.031) than participants
who played as a White avatar (M¼0.029 g, SD ¼0.031),
t(138) ¼3.73, p< .0001, d¼0.64. This is between a medium
and a large effect size.
Mediation Analysis
Finally, we tested whether implicit attitudes that Blacks are
violent mediated the effect of avatar race on aggressive beha-
vior. As Figure 3 shows, playing a violent video game as a
Black avatar (coded 1 vs. White avatar coded 0) increased
implicit attitudes linking Blacks to weapons, which, in turn,
increased aggressive behavior. The indirect effect of avatar
race on aggression, through implicit attitudes, was significant
(b¼0.06, p¼.008; 95%bootstrap confidence interval with
10,000 samples ¼[0.0006, 0.15], which excludes the value
0; see Preacher & Hayes, 2004). Including the indirect effect
in the model decreased the direct effect of avatar race on
aggression, but it still remained significant, indicating that the
effect of avatar race on aggression is only partially mediated
through implicit attitudes that Blacks are violent.
Figure 2. Implicit negative attitudes about Blacks for participants who
played a nonviolent or violent video game as a White or Black avatar.
Capped vertical bars denote 1 SE.SE ¼standard error.
4Social Psychological and Personality Science
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Discussion
Playing a violent video game as a Black avatar increased
White participants’ implicit attitudes that Blacks are violent.
Participants who played a violent video game as a Black ava-
tar had stronger implicit associations between Blacks and
weapons and behaved more aggressively after playing the
game than did participants who played as a White avatar.
Their implicit attitudes that Blacks are violent, in turn, were
linked to their actual aggressive behavior after the game was
turned off. Additional analyses showed that this increase in
implicit associations linking Blacks to violence partially
mediated the effect of playing a violent game as a Black ava-
tar on subsequent aggression. These findings suggest that
playing a violent video game as a Black avatar strengthens
players’ attitudes that Blacks are violent and influences play-
ers to behave aggressively afterward. The results of this study
reinforce the theoretical importance of priming as an implicit
psychological process by demonstrating that the stereotyping
process and its behavioral manifestation can be affected by
the subtle racial cues in video game playing.
General Discussion
Taken together, the results of the two experiments suggest
that a short-term experimental manipulation of the exposure
to subtle racial cues in violent video games can affect players’
implicit and explicit stereotyping and aggression. The present
findings are consistent with previous research, which has
shown that violent media prime aggression or aggression-
related concepts, at least in the short term (e.g., Roskos-
Ewoldsen, Klinger, & Roskos-Ewoldsen, 2007). The data are
also consistent with the general finding of stereotype research
that priming the racial stereotype automatically activates a
linkbetweenBlackmenandnegative constructs, such as vio-
lence and hostility (e.g., Abraham & Apiah, 2006; Dixon,
2007; Duncan, 1976). Unlike in other research, however,
stereotype activation in the current study was achieved
through a subtle change in the race of the game avatars parti-
cipants played as in the game.
The implications of these findings are readily apparent. Vio-
lent games with avatars that look and act in ways that match the
violence component of the Black stereotype directly affect the
racial attitudes and stereotypes of White people playing the
games. These White players are likely to come away from their
game-playing experience with stronger negative feelings about
Blacks and with stronger associations between Blacks and
weapons. In addition, playing a violent game as a Black avatar
is likely to lead players to behave even more aggressively
shortly after the game than they would if they played a violent
game as a White avatar.
Although at first blush this finding may appear to contradict
earlier studies showing reduced prejudice toward out-group
members after perspective taking, the perspective taking by
participants in our study differs both conceptually and metho-
dologically from conventional perspective-taking manipula-
tions. In most previous studies, participants were explicitly
asked to imagine how the target person (usually an out-group
member) would think or feel in a given situation, or they wrote
about a day in the life of the target person as a way to evoke
empathy (e.g., Davis, Conklin, Simth, & Luce, 1996; Galinsky
& Moskowitz, 2000). In some cases, participants were specif-
ically instructed to avoid thinking about the target person in a
stereotypical manner (e.g., Galinski, Wang, & Ku, 2008). In
our study however, no such deliberate and conscious efforts
were requested from the participants. Thus, by naturally taking
the perspective of the avatar they played, the fact that the avatar
enacted violent, stereotypically consistent actions led to an
increase in implicit and explicit stereotyping among these
participants.
Our research is the first to document the consequences of
playing violent video games as a Black avatar on stereotyping
Blacks in negative, violent ways. Violent video games can be
a powerful source of information about the world that helps to
shape the way in which players view the world. Given the
variety of violent games available to consumers, Blacks may
not be the only group to suffer due to their portrayal in violent
games. In some games, for example, police are portrayed as
brutal. Players witnessing or enacting these violent actions
may develop a distrust of the police. Other violent games por-
tray women in a sexualized and stereotypic way. These por-
trayals, too, may affect players’ stereotypes about women
(e.g., Dill, Brown, & Collins, 2008). These experiments pro-
vide one more piece of evidence that violent games can alter
the beliefs of the player about the situations portrayed within
the games.
The findings from Experiment 2 show that video games in
which players control violent Black avatars are not just ‘‘harm-
less fun.’’ Such games not only increase negative and violent
stereotypes about Blacks, but they also increase aggressive
behavior after the game has been turned off to a greater degree
than when players control violent White avatars. This is a very
troubling finding. This finding is particularly noteworthy,
given that this increase in aggression occurred over and above
any increase in aggression among participants playing the vio-
lent game as a White avatar.
Figure 3. The mediating role of implicit Blacks-are-violent attitudes in
the effect of playing a violent video game as a Black (vs. White) avatar
on subsequent aggression. The parameters are standardized path
coefficients. The value in parentheses is the direct effect of race of
avatar on aggression without the mediating variable in the model.
**p< .01.
Yang et al. 5
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Limitations and Future Research
However, more research needs to be done to elucidate the exact
process through which this effect on aggression occurs. The
effect of avatar race on aggression was partially mediated by
the participants’ increased associations between Blacks and
violence, but the mental process through which this happens
is unclear. It may be that the increased association between
Blacks and violence increases the priming of aggressive scripts
and beliefs over the priming that occurs from simply playing a
violent game. Future research should examine this question.
Another question for future research is the effect that knowl-
edge of the race of the target would have on aggression after
playing a violent game as a Black avatar. Participants in
Experiment 2 did not know the race of the target they were
aggressing against. Future research can directly manipulate
whether the aggression target is White versus Black. Likewise,
all of our participants were White. Future research can test
whether similar effects are obtained for Black participants.
Conclusion
In conclusion, our work documents the negative consequence
of violent video games that employ violent Black avatars. Mal-
colm X argued that the media are powerful, even powerful
enough to make ‘‘the innocent guilty.’’ Our research suggests
that people who play violent video games as violent Black
characters are more likely to believe that Blacks are violent
people, even if they are innocent of ever committing violence.
Additionally, playing a video game as a violent Black character
is likely to increase the player’s aggression against others
immediately afterward, even more than playing a violent game
as White characters would.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to
the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.
Note
1. There were no differences between the wrestling and boxing video
games, so they were combined for all analyses.
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Author Biographies
Grace S. Yang has a Ph.D. in communication studies from the Univer-
sity of Michigan. She studies the effects of new media on human
thought and behavior.
Bryan Gibson is a professor of psychology at Central Michigan Uni-
versity, USA. He studies media psychology, attitude formation, and
consumer psychology.
Adam Lueke is a Ph.D. student in psychology at Central Michigan
University, USA. He studies mindfulness, attitudes, and stereotyping.
L. Rowell Huesmann is Amos N. Tversky Collegiate Professor of
Psychology and Communication Studies at the University of Michi-
gan, USA and Director of the Aggression Research Program in the
Research Center for Group Dynamics at Michigan’s Institute for
Social Research. He studies aggression and violence.
Brad J. Bushman is a professor of communication and psychology at
The Ohio State University, USA where he is the Margaret Hall and
Robert Randal Rinehart Chair of Mass Communication. He is also a
professor of communication science at the VU University Amsterdam,
the Netherlands. He studies aggression and violence.
Yang et al. 7
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