Social Networks

Porn and video game addicts risk ‘masculinity crisis,’ says Stanford professor — RT News

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Men who play video games “in excess” and watch online porn are facing what has been called a masculinity crisis, according to a leading US psychologist.

Reuters/Robert Galbraith

For those who think online video games and porn are passive online activities that have no real consequences in the real world, take heed.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo interviewed 20,000 young people in the United States, 75 percent of them male, and found that excessive, solitary playing of video games and watching porn is seriously damaging the social development of young men.

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“Our focus is on young men who play video games to excess, and do it in social isolation – they are alone in their room,” Zimbardo, who just released a book on the subject, entitled“Man (Dis)Connected,” told the BBC in an interview.

“Now, with freely available pornography – which is unique in history – they are combining playing video games, and as a break, watching on average, two hours of pornography a week.”

Zimbardo says “excessive” use of video games and pornography is not necessarily a matter of specific time, but rather the psychological change in mindset that such isolated activities produce, where the individual begins to feel he’d rather be doing that particular activity than anything else.

Phillip Zimbardo, 82, is a psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is perhaps best known for his 1971 experiment in which students were asked to play the roles of ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’ in a mock prison. Intended to continue for two weeks, the experiment was aborted in less than a week as the initially normal ‘guards’ eventually became sadistic and the ‘prisoners’ became submissive and depressed. Zimbardo has also written introductory psychology books, textbooks for college students, and other notable works, including The Lucifer Effect and the The Time Cure. Zimbardo is the founder and president of the Heroic Imagination Project.

“When I’m in class, I’ll wish I was playing World of Warcraft. When I’m with a girl, I’ll wish I was watching pornography, because I’ll never get rejected,” he explained. The brains of young men are actually becoming “digitally rewired” by these new pastimes.

Zimbardo says that one of the consequences is the so-called“porn-induced erectile dysfunction,” or PIED, where young men who should be sexually active are “having a problem getting an erection.”

“You have this paradox – they’re watching exciting videos that should be turning them on, and they can’t get turned on.”

While playing video games and watching pornography are not necessarily bad activities, they can begin to have a negative effect on the social development of individuals if used in excess, the psychologist said.

He believes that parents need to take more control of the situation by taking simple steps, like keeping a journal for tracking how much time is being set aside for a variety of different activities, like doing homework, reading and writing.
At the same time, schools need to rethink their sexual education requirements, and instead of placing excessive emphasis on the physical side of relations, talk more about communication and expressing emotions, he said.

“We need to set standards of excellence, and be aware that there is a problem in the first place,”Zimbardo said.

Russian student invents bracelet to tackle computer addiction .

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Russian students have invented a unique bracelet capable of preventing kids from spending too much time in front of a computer. Tracking children’s biorhythms, it can even autonomously switch off computers, averting possible health-related consequences.

RIA Novosti/Igor Zarembo

The bracelet is currently in the final stages of development at the Academic IT School of Perm State University, with a model ready for production expected by the end of year.

“The project is aimed at lowering the psychological pressure experienced by the personal computer users. It’s especially important for children as we live in the 21st century when kids have unlimited access to computers, which don’t always have a positive effect on them,” Dmitry Zotin, the bracelet’s inventor and an Academic IT School student, told RT.

It’ll be “more like parental control,” but it’ll be the hardware and software, not parents, managing the time spent by the youngster in front of a PC, he explained.

Spending too much behind the computer can make it hard for children to sleep at night and increase risk of attention problems, anxiety, depression and even obesity, medics warn.

The bracelet will be tracking the child’s cardiac rhythm and skin temperature, using Bluetooth to transfer this data to a program installed on the computer.

Based on the physiological data, the software will decide whether to change the computer’s settings, adjust screen brightness, block certain parts of the operating system or even shut down the whole PC.

The program will also record all actions performed by the user on the computer, including mouse clicks, buttons pressed and others, to provide him with advice on how to use his time in front of the monitor more effectively.

It’s going to be “an enforcement procedure” for the children, Zotin said, adding that the bracelet will turn the computer off automatically if the kid ignores the program’s warnings that he or she spent too much time in social networks or playing.

As for adult users, the bracelet will inform them that they are tired or stressed and advise to change activity or take a break, he added.

Zotin says that in the future his invention may also be introduced in offices to monitor how effectively employees use their time behind the computer and to ensure they get enough rest from staring at the screen.

The bracelet is currently only compatible with desktop computers, with no plans yet to make a version for tablets and video game consoles.

Social Contagions: Life Inside The Peer Pressure Chamber

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Maybe you’re in line at the bank when it happens, or riding in a crowded elevator — viruses don’t care. Before you can fortify your body with gallons of orange juice, you’re pinned to your mattress with a hard plastic stick under your tongue. You were infected, quietly and with great force, by a tiny biological invader.

Transmission from host to host is the means by which pathogens like the flu, the common cold, warts, and more, replicate. Now a growing school of thought in the social sciences says infection isn’t confined to bacteria and viruses. “Social contagion” is an umbrella term for the variety of major life choices that seem to spread with the same level of viral force as the disease-carrying pathogens that can buffet our immune systems.

Social contagions burrow their way into our unconscious processes through friendly interactions, familial advice, and romantic persuasions. They compel us to get married now, get divorced now, and lose weight n– well, maybe next week.

We seldom know when we’ve been infected, because much of the time the decisions that define the course of our lives are made unconsciously. James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, argues that the various tiny, mostly unimportant choices we make day-to-day end up determining the path of our lives much more than our so-called big decisions.

“We’re making decisions all the time,” he told me. We choose our outfits, our breakfast, our choice of words at the water cooler. When we ultimately decide to take bigger leaps — think weight loss or a cross-country move — that choice isn’t up to us anymore. We may think we’re being present and rational, but the first domino may have actually fallen years ago. And that may have been the result of a social contagion.

1.My Life In Your Hands

In the world of social contagion research, two to five years is the agreed upon length of time it takes a contagion to infect its host. It’s just enough time to yield an effect, but also just long enough for us to forget why, exactly, we’re compelled to eat better or fork over a down payment on that house. We may have the final say, but months and months of incremental exposure have steered that decision for us. Consider the innumerable new fathers who step onto wobbly bathroom scales each day only to find they’ve gained a dozen pounds in the last year. Aghast, they blame their crumbling willpower, or a failed exercise regimen — failing to recall sleeve after sleeve of cookies they consumed alongside their pregnant wives. Social contagions are powerful because they are invisible.

Fowler is interested in why certain behaviors are so contagious and, importantly, what we can learn from them. To answer these questions, he and Nicholas A. Christakis, a Harvard physician and social scientist, turned to a well-known longitudinal study: the Framingham Heart Study. Since 1948, the study has produced some of the medical community’s deepest insights into cardiovascular health. In 1960, it discovered the link between cigarette smoking and heart disease. In 2002, it found obesity was a risk factor for heart failure.

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But perhaps its greatest contribution to science is its stellar (and unprecedented) retention rate. The first batch of participants were recruited in 1948; Fowler and Christakis decided to look at the data from their children, who make up the second generation study, which began in 1971 and ran to 2003. From the initial 1971 pool of 5,214 people, by 2003 only 10 had dropped out. For Fowler, this was data-mining gold. “It’s truly incredible,” he laughs. “I can’t get my undergraduates to show up next week, and these guys are getting people to show up over the course of 30 years.”

After much analysis, the team found that obesity spreads through social networks in patterns. Your geographic distance from someone impacts your future weight gain less than your social distance from that person. In other words, you’re more likely to gain weight if a close friend you see only occasionally starts gaining weight than if your coworker in the neighboring cubicle is packing on the pounds. The data suggest this correlation is even stronger if you and your friend are the same gender.

Subway riders walk through the turnstiles while leaving the U.S. Open in New York September 4, 2007.REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

There are plenty of other social contagions. Divorce, for example, appears to spread through close social connections. Fowler and Christakis joined forces again in 2009 to revisit the Framingham data. They found that participants with an immediate friend who got divorced were 75 percent more likely to end their own relationships. One step removed — the friend of a friend — and the effect dropped to 33 percent. Any further removed and the effect was negligible.

Or consider childbirth: a miraculous occasion we may naïvely assume is very much a personal decision. Not true. Childbirth is as socially contagious as obesity and divorce, and perhaps even more so. A study released earlier this May found that women in their late 20s and early 30s were significantly more likely to have kids if their friends from high school had given birth within the last two years. Social scientist and lead author of the study, Nicoletta Balbo, says childbirth becomes attractive to couples in several ways. “If your friend starts having children, you might feel the pressure to conform to this parental tendency,” she said. Women may feel pushed to the fringes, that they have less in common with their friends and each additional stroller or diaper becomes yet another tick off the dreaded biological clock.

Succumbing to these influences can be pragmatic. Couples who have kids around the same time tend to use each other as learning experiences. They trade tips, horror stories, and (gently) used onesies. If a couple has doubts about whether they are ready to become parents, they can turn to their close friends who just had their first child, who, when they were deciding whether to conceive, turned to a couple theyknew. The network grows and grows.

2.The Fated Salad

What emerges from this cascade of decision-making is a general notion of timing. It’s why we see dot-com and housing bubbles, baby booms and tipping points; when enough people of the same age collectively agree that certain priorities trump others, a generation is born. According to Jonah Berger, marketing professor at Wharton and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, all of it happens organically. “Following others acts as a shortcut,” Berger told me, but in a more profound sense, he said, “it also acts as information about what seems more correct to do.”

The problem is that, sometimes, the behaviors that seem socially “correct” end up being catastrophic. Many studies suggest that suicide and non-suicidal self-injury(NSSI) are transmitted socially, and mostly among young students. Last year, Canadian researchers showed that a schoolmate’s suicide made children ages 12 to 17 five times more likely to have suicidal thoughts. Similarly, obesity is both a social contagion and a bona fide public health epidemic. More than a third of the U.S. population is overweight or obese, and we’re catching it from each other.

Research also shows that teen pregnancy succumbs to the will of social forces. One 2011 study, for example, found teen girls were more likely to get pregnant if they had older sisters who also got pregnant in their teens. Data from the Department of Health and Human Services reveals teen mothers are more likely to drop out of high school, rely on public assistance (a yearly burden on taxpayers totaling upward of $28 billion), and raise children who suffer from health and behavioral problems.

On the other hand, the benefits of social contagions may outnumber their drawbacks. Consider the antidote to obesity: weight loss. People who try to lose weight on their own fail far more often than do two people who set the goal together. A studyconducted in 1999 found people who dieted by themselves lost less weight than people who dieted with a friend or family member. Among the loner group, 76 percent completed treatment and 24 percent kept the weight off by the four-month mark. Social support, meanwhile, boosted rates to 95 percent completion and 66 percent maintenance.

“The more we’re aware of social influences, the more we can try to correct against them,” Berger said.  This is why social contagions, despite their ability to infect, arenot viruses. Your immune system’s response to viruses is automatic, but when it comes to choosing a sensible salad for dinner, you have control over that decision — despite the high probability that your dining partner will choose a juicy steak. So enjoy your salad. Just know your first forkful of lettuce was two years in the making.