A new study by the Stanford psychology department appears to confirm parents’ worst fears when it comes to letting their children play violent video games. After exposing a group of young men to one such game, the team of scientists identified a significant uptick in the subject’s likelihood of eating a ton of apples and growing incrementally longer.
“There were two sets of subjects: half played a violent video game we supplied them, and the other half stared at a blank wall for 45 minutes,” explained lead investigator Natalia Smithson. “We then released them all into a square room full of apples. The ‘wall’ group just sat in a corner and kept staring at the wall, but the ‘video game’ group? Well, they slowly walked around the room, eating the apples one by one and becoming increasingly… long.”
Smithson clarified that the latter group did not chew or bite the apples, but instead unhinged their jaws and swallowed the fruits whole.
Although the study appears to confirm concerns that violent video games can prompt equally violent behavior in young adults, it has also come under criticism for its treatment of the test subjects. Stanford’s Human Subjects Review Board is now calling for a third-party investigation into why all of the test subjects in the ‘video game’ group died during the experiment, after becoming so long that they accidentally smashed themselves face-first into their own butts and died.
“That’s simply unethical,” the Board wrote.
This is not the only time Stanford’s labor practices have landed the university in hot water. A complaint filed by PETA in 2013 alleged that biology researchers compelled thousands of small frogs to run across US 101 in order to test “amphibian reflex times,” and OSHA is still conducting an investigation into a 2005 incident wherein a worker helping rebuild a 2-D wall of the football stadium was crushed to death by a misplaced 1×4 steel beam that workers attempted to fit into the wrong slot.
