Myth: Media violence experts are either psychologists or psychiatrists

Myth: Most experts in media violence are psychologists and psychiatrists.

This is an unnoticed myth which is silently perpetrated by the media (mainstream and gamer news) and society. I never heard of a news report about a video game study that doesn’t come from psychology or interviews from a non-psychology expert on the media violence issue. It invariably ends with something or someone in psychology. Of course, many critics of media violence are non-psychologists, but proponents of the media violence issue are mostly psychologists or health experts. But this argument is rather detracting from my current line of reasoning. This is based on faulty common sense thinking that psychology is a more valued science than communication studies. If you think about communication studies, most of us would not consider it as serious as psychology. I know I haven’t, two years ago, since the communications department in my Uni looks like armchair academics (I’m not apologizing). The truth is that many excellent and psychological video games studies have been conducted by experts in communication studies and their multi-disciplinary research approach is well suited to study video games given its complexity and how it is studied by virtually every field in social science. My advice to the media and everyone is to give the attention they deserve.