This article was taken from the June 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo made his name in the 70s with a study about the psychological effects of prison. Subjects who were assigned the role of guards became abusive; prisoners became submissive. The experiment showed that context could be a more powerful influence on behaviour than personality. In his new book, Man (Dis)connected, written with Nikita Coulombe, Zimbardo, 82, describes another powerful influence on our behaviour: technology. According to Zimbardo, today's young men are failing "academically, socially and sexually". Why? Pornography and video games. "We're concerned that the more provocative and lifelike video games and porn become, the more reality will mesh with virtual reality, and the more egocentric young men will become," write Zimbardo and Coloumbe. WIRED talks to him about the link between porn and games, the neuroscience of addiction and why boys particularly are affected.
**WIRED: Your book argues that access to porn and video games is affecting young boys socially, intellectually and sexually. How did you get interested in this?**Philip Zimbardo: A number of years ago my son Adam, then 18, became a video-game addict. He was at Stanford, he was a bright student and yet he would rather play games than do anything else. Then my students started staying up all night playing video games and turning up groggy to lectures. I'm not a gamer, so the idea that kids could spend 12 hours a day playing games was astounding. I couldn't understand it, so we decided to study this issue. It turned out that this problem was really pervasive. I have nothing against video games but the issue is when they are played in excess and in social isolation.
**You also establish a link between pornography and gaming. In your book you write that the combination of excessive video-gaming and porn use creates a "deadly duo", resulting in withdrawal from normal activities and social interaction.**We were the first to establish that link. Today you just need a few clicks to go from Warcraft to Pornhub. Kids at a very young age can do that. There are no controls over it. Most parents don't even know about free pornography. Boys are just spending inordinate amounts of time alone in their room playing video games and alternating them with porn.
**So porn is also being consumed in excess by very young kids?**For young boys and teenagers who have not really had any sexual experience, porn is their sex education. This is what they see and it becomes the norm. What they don't see is romance, they don't see kissing, they don't see bargaining or setting boundaries. It's all physical manipulation and it ends when the man has an orgasm on the woman's face or mouth or whatever. That's not what they're going to encounter in the real world. Many of the boys we interviewed say porn is better than real sex because they can't get rejected. In porn, there is no "no'", it is only "yes". It's free, it's accessible, you don't have to go on a date, you don't have to have a long conversation. Porn is there whenever you want it, you squeeze it in for a 20-minute period, there's no commitment.
**And there's now very compelling evidence about how this affects their brains as well...**There's new research showing that the reward centres of the brain get lit up in excess when playing video games and watching pornography. It's a generalised arousal. You become habituated to anything that's rewarding and that you keep exposing yourself to. It loses its potency and interest. To maintain the arousal level there has to be variation – and video game and porn companies know that so they keep adding variations. In real life we don't have that possibility. Now, when I talk about addiction, it's really a change from mental sensibility: you would rather be doing that thing than anything else in the world. And when you're not doing it, you're thinking about it. With kids, when they go to school, they wish they were in front of their screen playing video games or watching pornography. Everything else in the world becomes dull and boring in comparison. It's a sad state of affairs, because real sex is not going to be as exciting as porn sex, real education is not going to be as exciting as Warcraft. Boys are failing, dropping out of school, getting the worst grades. They are diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, and so we drug them, but they're just bored. There's no attention deficit playing video games. School pales in comparison to the concrete images of people shooting at you or of people having sex.
**So kids today are the first generation going through this?**Right on. It's only in the last few years that there's been free porn, and video games are extremely popular. Parents have to be aware that this is a serious problem. It's not going away, it's not a phase in kids' lives. The ease of access makes it almost impossible to control.
**The porn and the gaming industries, both male-dominated, are indirectly sabotaging the next generation of men?**Yes, they are sabotaging it, in a very insidious way. The people who are developing the games in the industry are primarily male. Online porn is a male business and it's for males. There's a profit motive that drives those industries and, yes, given the male domination, it's a vicious cycle.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
