Dr. Rebecca Goldin
George Mason University
Dr. Rebecca Goldin is a professor of mathematical sciences at George Mason University. Goldin is the director of STATS (opens new window), a nonprofit, non-partisan project to analyze and explain numbers and statistics in the news and to promote statistical literacy in the media and society.
2017 Festival – Do Video Games Cause Violence? Exploring the Mind with Statistics
Do video games cause violence? The simple answer is, “It’s complicated.” Reports on recent studies assume that a functional brain scan can “measure aggression,” but what does that mean? The human brain is complex. The research is varied and “aggression” can be interpreted differently in different contexts. While the detailed neural mechanisms underlying mental and emotional states remain poorly understood, mathematical and statistical models form the foundation for our incomplete, approximate knowledge on this and many other important, but not yet rigorously defined, social and scientific questions.
