Toy Guns

different sequences of sound effects. So the first one would go like do you do? You do you do? And then the next one would go what what what? And the next one would be like I've got that kind of memorized in my brain. Uh. And in the version that I had, there was like a little red and blue clear plastic case over some led lights that would shoot back and forth when you fired the gun. Do you know what I'm talking about? I don't know what the name of this thing is, so I don't know

how to look it up. I I don't think I had the exact one you had, but I must have had like an earlier model because I had one. It was black and red, and it did the exact same sound effects you're discussing here, So I feel like it had to have been the same tech in just a

different color, or like a slightly different plastic toy gun. Now, there was one thing I liked about this toy gun, which was that every time you pull the trigger, it would make a different sound effect, which means that it was almost like you could imagine that you had like one of the Stormtrooper blasters from the very beginning of Star Wars, where you have multiple settings. You can set, I guess for the regular blast, and then you can set for stun. Except the problem was you couldn't toggle

the sound effects on this thing. They just went in a sequence, So if you wanted to get one sound effect in particular, you'd have to pull the trigger a certain number of time to like run through the cycle and get back there. I think part of that is the toy designers focus on tormenting the parents, because I've

noticed this in contemporary toys as well. Um, where my son has a few different lightsabers, and one of the ones he has it seems to at random either do lightsaber noises or play part of the Star Wars theme. But it seems entirely unpredictable, so if the batteries are in, if the device is on, and it seems also confusing about if it's toggled on or not. Like you, you're never sure. Um yeah, you it's a parent listening in from the next room over. You don't know what to expect.

It just keeps you completely on edge. I think if you want to calibrate a sound effects toy for maximum parental torment, you should somewhat randomize the sounds that come out and the sequence at which they come out, because that we know that randomized rewards they tend to create more addictive effects. The child will make the sound effects more often for longer durations, and the parents will slow

lose their minds. And of course it's also in a in a way ridiculous because when we were kids, but also kids today perfectly capable of creating their own sound effects. You don't need the toy ray gun to go, pu pu, You don't need the lightsaber to go because we can do those sound effects. We do them all the time. Um. In fact, I think I read that that they had to get on to you and McGregor in filming the prequel films, because he kept making those sounds with his

mouth during the lightsaber battles. Yeah, I read that somewhere. I don't know if that's true, but it's it's it's wonderful either way. So he was like Anakin, I have the high ground. M yep, I think so. But I guess this all comes up because today you wanted to talk about toy guns, which I thought was a very

interesting topic. Yeah. And in a way, this is a holiday episode because the holidays are about toys under the trees, right, and the holidays at their best or about imaginative escapes, and um, you know, I know in my own experience raising an eight year old, it's it's proven impossible to ignore the specter of the gun. Um. You know, it's it's everywhere, it was, and it was, you know, in

our upbringing. So I thought it would be good to look at some of the sort of broad studies and meta analyzes that that look at the idea of toy guns, because I mean, first and foremost, we have to recognize that that actual guns are lethal instruments designed to kill animals and or humans, depending on their exact design. Now, gun ownership itself is obviously a divisive topic, and one can spend a lot of time discussing objections to the legal use of such weapons. And there's there's too much

here for us to get into in this episode. But I think we can mostly agree that improper use and misuse of firearms is to be avoided, and in very broad strokes, I'm thinking about guns used in homicides and suicides, guns used in mass shootings and accidental deaths, involving firearms, especially those involving children, right, and of course the the some implication there is that children should not be playing with real guns, even though there's clearly a desire among

many children to enact types of play that involve guns or involve surrogates for guns. So so there's sort of a natural accommodation that happens there. It's like, well, kids want to want to pretend to play with guns, Obviously they should not be seeking out and handling real guns, so give them plastic toy guns. Yeah, and of course, especially nowadays, but but I mean this was also president in the minds of parents in the past too. You know, we ask ourselves, are we doing the right thing? Should

they have toy guns? Should we take all the toy guns away? Um? So many questions that emerge. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I I wonder about this question myself. I mean I can, I can very much see both sides of it. I mean, on one hand, I feel like, well, you know, conflict play is a normal type of imaginative play. Uh. One of the most common types of conflict that children are going to imagine given the world we live in, is

conflict with guns. So they will want to act that out and in a way that just seems like part of childhood development. But then on the other hand, like if you watch a child, like, you know, running around pretending to shoot each other, You're like, oh my god, no,

something horrible is happening here. This can't be allowed. Yeah. Yeah, it gets increasingly complex the more you think about it, you know, because especially since you're dealing in different worlds, you know, generally speaking, like the child's world and their exposure to guns is almost entirely within this room of fantasy, you know, if you know, if if you're fortunate and uh, and adults live in a broader world of understanding about what guns are and what they can do, and you

don't want to just grab them and pull them completely into your bubble. But but then also the question is what should I leave them over there and their bubble, Like yeah, yeah, it becomes this this this labyrinth, this maze that you try and figure your way out of. So this is what we're gonna basically be talking about in today's episode. But before we go go further, I thought it might be helpful to go ahead and throw out some stats and some numbers, um, just to um,

you know, underlie the conversation here. So according to the CDC stats for eighteen, the most recently made available as of this recording, at the tail end of the United States saw thirty eight thousand, three ninety deaths from firearm violence in and that accounted for sevent of homicides and of suicides uh those involved firearms. Additionally, Americans are ten times more likely to be killed by guns than people in other developed countries, according to a two thousand sixteen

study published in the American Journal of Medicine. Gun purchases surged over the summer in twenty as did incidents of gun violence we face. And on top of that, of course, we faced increased awareness of police violence against minorities, and, as Craig Jackson pointed out on the conversation, despite lockdown measures in the US, mass shootings in the US sharply rows.

As of November twenty six, I believe there were five hundred seventy eight mass shootings in the country, already ahead of the total four hundred and seventeen from the year before. So we have to face the fact that if our children are going to be running around pretending to play with guns, you're holding that in your head with the reality of all the terrible things that guns can do

and have been used to do, even just in recent memory. Yeah, I mean, as as a parent, it is it is at once terrifying and then terrifyingly commonplace to get that that robot call from your school telling you that the school has been locked down because of an incident in the surrounding area, but that everything is cool, and you're you know it, it's it's shocking, and then you're like, oh, everything's okay, And then you you ask yourself, should I

feel okay about this? Because I feel like I shouldn't. But anyway, is as far as children and guns go. Some more stats here at two thousand sixteen study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that death by gunshot with the second highest cause of death in the United States in sixteen among children and adolescents ages one through nineteen. Firearms were the second leading cause of death in two thousand fourteen for American children between ages

of one and nineteen, average of eight kids shot per day. Um. If you average that out over the calendar year, and then also saw an uptick in unintentional shootings by children by in March and April. And I believe commentators often you know, link that to the fact that suddenly children were at home more and it gave them greater opportunity to come across guns in the household. Uh. And and of course that opens up the door for misuse and

accidental usage of the weapon. I think sometimes people get the feeling when when you're talking about things like certain like safety precautions involving like gun storage, you know, should you keep a gun stored in the home loaded, and

questions like that. Um, It's it's strange how people can know what the risks of certain things are but still think, Uh, those risks only apply like statistically to people in general, and I am not like people in general, So I'm okay like that that I the same logic that holds true in general for people and households won't apply to me or to my household. You know, I don't need to worry about that kind of stuff. Isn't it like

weird how we can think like that? Yeah? Yeah, And and plus I think we also color our estimation of these numbers based on our own experiences, and are you know the limited nature of our experiences, you know, like I On on one hand, I can lie, I can look back at my own past and say, well, uh, you know, I grew up with guns in the household, and and I didn't, you know, have an accident with a gun. I didn't. I don't. I never loaded a

gun on my own or anything like that. I I don't think I knew anybody growing up that was engaged in a firearm related accident or the accidental you know, discharge of a fire firearm in the house. But but

then again, that's just my limited experience, you know. And you know, and then rationally, I'm not willing to to to roll the dice for my own child based on what I experienced, you know, right, I mean, but there is definitely a natural endency to sort of think of yourself as an exception to whatever the statistical rule is, and to elevate the importance of anecdotes in your own

life over the you know what the risks actually are exactly. Yeah, So as far as the stats go, we could we could keep going on and on about this and torture in the numbers, but and they're ultimately a number of different directions. One could go into discussing these numbers, the causes, the possible solutions. But one question that always comes up, sometimes in good faith, sometimes as the distraction, is what

about guns in childhood play? And and one of the reasons again, like we've been discussing that this is so um, you know, there's something we end up meditating on so much, is that, you know, I found that guns and media and subsequently in play are almost impossible to avoid because while you can curate what your kids watch and and ultimately this is even harder than I expected it to be.

They're still going to interact with other kids, and there's always going to be a kid on the playground that turns a stick into a weapon, turns a stick into a gun or a sword or a spear or what have you, but very often a gun. And even they don't have access to sticks, they can make the finger guns and blast away. Right. Yeah, again, I think this comes down to like this difficult question that people have over like how much is it reasonable to try to

control your child's experience of the world. Um, like you're always going to be balancing that. I mean, when you talked about media for some reason, the thing that immediately popped into my head is like, what happens once a child discovers YouTube? Like how do you do you just like set a child loose on YouTube? Or like how do if if not, how do you prevent that from happening? Uh? I don't you know, it just seems like it's it's mind boggling to me. Yeah, yeah, it is. You know

what we have. We can certainly go on about about that on that topic as well, but but of course sorry that that's ancillarity your main point, which is about play. Yeah, I mean, I think it's absolutely clear. Probably everybody who's been around kids for any amount of time or was once a child themselves, probably remembers or has observed the

natural emergence of violent and inflict play among kids. It doesn't seem like something Uh it's hard to rule this out, but it doesn't seem like something that like parents have to instruct their children how how to do it. Seems like it just kind of comes naturally out of the child brain that like, we need to enact some kind

of imaginative violent conflict. Yeah, and then the gun being an inevitable part of the conflict media, they absorb it just becomes a part of it, and it's a you know, you can try and sort of steer your children towards things like lightsabers and ninja turtles, you know, but even in those genres, a lot of guns, you know, there's a lot of are those are very ultimately very shooty

properties as well. So you know, unless you you know, just want your your you're just gonna feed your kid pop patrol over and over again and never let then move on to something else. Yeah, what do you do? It's funny how many of these properties I can think of several offhand. You know, Batman, uh, Star Wars whatever, have this sort of moral hierarchy of weapons selection where the most morally virtuous characters never use guns. They will use like hand to hand combat. They do still use

weapons of various types lightsabers and all that. But then as you go down the the hierarchy, down the ladder of moral virtue into more ambiguous and then ultimately evil characters, the propensity for firearms and firearm analogs gets higher and higher. Yeah, that is interesting, and and I I suppose I like that. There may be problems with it if I an analyze it too much, but on the surface, I like that that I that idea that the lightsaber is the civilized

weapon and the blaster is the uncivilized weapon. So I guess, I guess it's complicated there because also the Sith lords primarily use lightsabers, like the most evil of the most evil also is shoe blasters and and will only you know, you can do a lot of damage with the lightsaber. You can be a bad guy with just a laser sword. Yeah. I have reservations at times when I am ambushed by my my son with the lightsaber, because even though I'm not being you know, shot at in all way, you know,

he is trying to dismember me. So but it's dismemberment that comes from a place of love. Yeah, Yeah, um, and you know, well, I think we'll actually come back to to some of that in a bit here, but but let's go ahead and talk about just the topic of aggressive play, because that's, you know, very broadly what we're talking about here. Um, you know, getting out of the media portion of this and getting more into like what children are doing when they're engaging with their toys

and each other and their imagination. As Jeffrey Goldstein of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands pointed out in Aggressive Toy Play published in and the Future of Play Theory, aggressive play includes mock fighting, general rough housing, and fantasy aggression. And we can further think of imaginary battles and war

toys as being part of war play. Part quote. Aggressive toys and war toys are those that children use in play fighting and fantasy aggression, including but not limited to toys that resemble what pens And naturally this covers a great deal of territory. You know, an old timey you know, silver toy, cowboy pistol. You know that there's a there's a weapon, uh toy, a bright orange ray gun. It looks like nothing you would actually use in a real

world combat. Scenario, same case, a tiny blaster and a Lego Mini Mini figures hand yep that applies Lego blocks formed roughly into the shape of a gun. The same thing, stick finger guns, you name it. All of that kind of falls under the same uh loose category here, So basically like most of the toys I remember having as a kid. That might be overstating it, but it is weird also that I wonder how much of this has

changed generationally. I'm sure people were having this debate when we were kids, But I just remember having lots and lots of explicit weapon and even gun toys as a child, and all my friends having the same stuff. Yeah, and I remember making guns like I would watch like a James Bond film and I think it was what from Russia with Love? And there's the whole thing we has,

like a rifle that folds up in a suitcase. So I somehow got my hands on an old suitcase and I had like a pipe that I had in there, and like some sort of capsule that I was pretending was the the bullet you know. Um, Yeah, it's just it was so so easy to get excited about those things. Well, I think you you should be proud of any child who shows ingenuity of that kind. What did you also

make yourself a like a Robert Shaw garatt wire? Oh? Yeah, that that suitcase had so many interesting bits of spycraft in it. But um, I can't remember what all I had in it. You know, it was it was the imagination was like it, So it wasn't too impressive. Okay. Now, generally speaking, studies have shown and continue to show that that boys display more aggressive play than girls and their various theorized reasons here, But it doesn't mean that it's

only boys by any stretch. The sex differences, though, seem to have been observed across cultures. Uh. Now, given you know, the cultural landscape of everything, I imagine this is an area where we're going to continue to see analysis of

where we are with this and where we're going with this. Uh, you know, because there were a number of of sort of loose ends I could have gone after when I was looking at this, and originally, like, there's a whole thing about like gender marketing in a gun weapons, you know, particularly like in nerve toys. So there's a lot to

consider just in this category as well. But these seem to be the trends that have played out over time, and these are the trends that are often, uh at least brought up in any kind of study regarding aggressive play and gun play among children. Yeah, it seems pretty clear that the aggressive play is uh present regardless of gender, but it's more common in boys. Now. Goldstein pointed out that warplay usually begins around age two and occurs once a week with at least a couple of other kids.

I love this detail because I know what he's saying. But it also makes me imagine like a child keeping a schedule and you're like, hey, do you wanna do you want to watch a movie this Wednesday? As I'm sorry, I got warplay? Um, you know Keith and Toby are are are already, Um, yes, is for that, so I'm

gonna have to pass. I like that, And it also makes me think of, um, remembering back to my own childhood, how thin sometimes the boundary was between something that was explicitly war or violence play and something that was a thinly disguised or leaky surrogate for war violence play, some kind of game that was like almost a war that would you'd easily sort of like slip into it being a violent war. Do you know what I mean? Oh? Yeah, yeah, I mean I think one of the most you know,

obvious examples, of course, sports itself. I mean, you know, several times away, like what every day you would go to pe class, and you know, maybe you're square dancing or doing that thing with the with the parachute where you dance around in circles with it. But a lot of times you're playing games, sports games, and those are essentially wars. Those are wars that are that are carried out in a mostly nonviolent way with some rule limitations,

but they kind of fulfill the same role that warfare plays. Um. And then you know, on on top of that, you've

got all sorts of things, all sorts of games. I mean, you could, if you really wanted to stretch things, you could say a game of cards as a war, I mean any kind of competition, right, yeah, And but I mean in a in a closer literal sense, I mean, I remember a lot of the games we came up with as a child, when you're not playing like a pre created game that has its own rules and all that external to you, but you're doing some kind of

Calvin Ball thing. When kids do all the time that you come up with some original game in your head and you play with your friends. A lot of those games I recall, we're basically just like half a step removed from being a cage match. You know. It's like it's a game that maybe involves a ball or you know, some kind of abstract item or rules in some way, but it could easily just devolve into a battle royale. Yeah. Well, I guess a part of it is when you see kids play, A lot of it comes down to this

sort improv that they're doing. They're all bringing a certain energy and certain ideas to what they're playing and how they're playing. And so you know, the right combination of kids might be just concerned with building a house for a mouse or doing an archaeological dig in the dirt. But then there's gonna be a kid that comes up and he's gonna bring the finger gun, you know, kind of like a Michael Scott in the office in every

improv scene pretends to have a gun. Well, that scene in the Office highlights a great thing about about play actually, which is that you know, occasionally in an improv scene, if somebody were to bring a gun into the scene that would be fun and interesting and it would liven things up and oh, what are we gonna do now? But the problem comes because he introduces a gun into

every improv skit. And I think the same thing could probably be said of play, Like, you know, it's normal for children to enact imaginative conflict play, but when when some kid wants to turn everything into an imagine violent conflict,

then it's like, Okay, that's not fun anymore. Yeah, yeah, And then I don't remember it was explicitly stated or if it was even implied, but I'm looking back on it, I kind of feel like it was the same gun scenario that he would bring, which also ties into some of the points that are made in one of the

sources we looked at for this episode. So anyway, the big question here is not whether kids engage in aggressive play, because they do, but it's rather about what is it for and indeed, if it actually leads to more aggressive behavior. And Goldsteam points to a trio of studies from the ninety nines that that indicate that war games and video games with violent themes increase the frequency and duration of aggressive play, but the connection to actually aggressive behavior that

that's a different story that's ultimately a lot more complicated. Yeah, I guess this is the big question that a lot of parents are probably worried about, Like if they watched their kids doing doing aggressive play. What they're worried about often is does this mean my child is going to

grow up to be a violent person. Yeah, And we may think about this sometimes as adults when we play our video games and and whatnot, especially if you're playing a game that actually gives you like a kill count, which could be a little sobering at times, and you're like, oh my god, I sure did pretend shoot a lot of people, am I? Okay? So anyway, that that's the whole area we'll have to consider coming back to in

the future. But uh, I've got a good place to go from here would be to travel back to ninety seven and consider something that we know as the weapons effect. So back in sixty seven, American social psychologist Leonard Berkowitz and co author Anthony Lapage conducted a randomized study using

male college students. Now, each test involved two participants, but one of these participants was always a secret accompliments accomplice of the testers, so you only really have one random individual one you know, purer college student that's in here, in is being test it. The other person is just is actually a part of the study, but pretending to

be a test subject. So the subject in the accomplice would take turns engaging in a mundane task, such as the example that that I saw listed was listing ideas to help sell used cars, and the first point a gun at the buyer. No, no, no, the gun. The gun comes in later. But but so the the actual assignment here has nothing to do with guns. It's just something mundane and you know, and ultimately I think non violent. So first the accomplice gives the subject feedback on their work.

And they give this feedback with between zero and ten small electric shocks. Okay, okay, yeah, so that's again that's the fake test subject shocking the actual test subject. But then it's the actual test subjects turn to shock back. Uh So this was the basic test for regression. How many shocks would they retaliate with? How aggressive would they be? And here's where the weapon came into play. Sometimes there

was a gun or guns on the table. I believe it was a shotgun and a revolver um, and in other cases, they would have a badminton racket and some shuttlecocks, and there was also a control group that had no items on the table at all. The actual subjects were told that these were just part of another study and we're just items to be ignored, which of course sounds

kind of comical in and of itself. Um but but but I mean the big thing is, it's impossible to ignore those weapons, right, I mean, there's a there's it's it's kind of impossible to ignore anything that is there on the table, like the shuttle cocks and the badminton racket, but especially the pistol and the shotgun. It's kind of reminds me of in Madmen were for a long time, Pete Campbell just carries a rifle around the office and no one seems to think it's that big a deal.

Oh man, I forgot about that episode, but that comes up and said pull episodes. It's like a fixture. Huh. So, as you can imagine the idea, here is what happens. How does just the mere sight of weapons, the mere sight of some guns, how does that affect, uh, the

individual's aggressive response? And so this is this is what the results were provoked participants who saw the guns were more aggressive than the other participants, and the authors called this the weapons effect, and they argued that it meant that the mere sight of a gun made us more aggressive, not more aggressive without provocation, minds you, and certainly not so provoked that they say, grab the gun or anything like that, but more aggressive within the boundaries of the

study parameters. Okay, so what they're claiming is to have found that when you see the gun, it's not that you pick up the gun and kill somebody with it, but when you see the gun, it's going to make you make your shape, your cognition to give more shocks

to this other guy and to be more vengeful. Right, And you know, this kind of lines up with a lot of studies that we've that have been conducted in that we've looked at in the past about just how random or even you know, not so random things in our environment, symbols, etcetera, can affect the way that we think and behave, you know, be it religious iconography, or eyes staring at us from something. You know that that all all of these things, all all of this is

stimuli that can affect the manifestation of the mind. Oh yeah, So if, for example, you take that study that found that people might be more generous in putting money into like a collection box if there are some eyes painted on it, or or less likely to steal money from it. If there's some eyes painted on it. What's the effect if there's just a gun sitting beside it? Yeah, or

the collection play, yeah, has a gun? Like what if the what if the santa that is collecting coins with the bell, what if he also is packing a heat I don't know, I don't know if you saw this, but actually the one of the authors here, Leonard Burkwitz, is associated with an anti metaboli that he used to communicate the results that he said he found here, and anti metaboli was yes, it's true that the finger pulls

the trigger, but sometimes the trigger also pulls the finger. Yes, yeah, that's that's a that's a big one, and that of course has been been echoed a lot, because as you can well imagine, um, this is at there's an argument that definitely plays into the various discussions that have taken

place over the subsequent decades regarding weapons in society. Now, I will say that one thing we know that this is basically going to be one example of a study on what's known as priming, right, the priming effects of like seeing objects and how that affects cognition. And there are a lot of questions about priming studies, I mean, UH, and some priming effects really do seem to hold up

under subsequent testing. Some priming effects that people have found UH in studies of decades past have really been undermined by like failed replication attempts or later analyzes. So part of the question would be, how does this UH supposed priming effects discovered in the sixties hold up under scrutiny and under review of all the subsequent research. Yeah, exactly, because it's one thing for one study to observe this back in the late sixties, but how does it hold

up over time and with different experiments, etcetera. So I was looking at effects of weapons on aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, hostile appraisals, and aggressive behavior a meta analytic review of the weapons effect UH literature. And this was by Benjamin at All, published in two thousand eighteen in the Personality and Social Psychology Review. In it, as the title implies, the authors looked at various later experiments into the so

called weapons effect. Uh. Yeah, because basically, there have been numerous versions of this experiment over the last fifty three years. And this isn't even the first meta analysis all of them. It's just one of the it's either the most recent or the most recent one that turned up when I was looking around. But these were big takeaways that Benjamin at all Um put out there. First of all, weapons do appear to increase aggressive thoughts and hostile appraisals, although

their effect on aggressive behavior is currently less clear. Uh, that's a that's a direct quote from the paper. But they also say that the relationship to that for the relationship to become more clear, we need quote higher powered studies with provocation manipulation, provocation manipulation. The hairs on the back of my next stand up at those two words.

But yeah, So what they're saying is that when you look at all of these studies over the years and you do a meta analysis, meaning you sort of like average all the results together and look at them in total, Uh, it does seem pretty clear that the seeing weapons around, the presence of weapons or weapon imagery, it makes people's thoughts more aggressive and it increases people's tendency to perceive hostility, but there's not necessarily evidence that it makes them act

more aggressive in an external way. Right. Yeah, it's an area whereas this is often the case, more more research is required. Yeah, And I gotta say, I think this is one realm where a meta analysis is very important rather than just looking at one study here or there.

Because I don't have any way to prove this, but I have a pretty strong gut feeling that, like guns, psychology research is an area of research where there are probably some people messing around in this field with some kind of political acts to grind one way or another. And so you probably could get some individual studies that

are less subjective than one would hope. Yeah. Yeah, And and likewise there's plenty of room for cherry picking from these studies as well, Like if you don't like the idea of the weapons effect, then yeah, you can definitely find some some studies that fail to replicate it, right uh. And and meta analysis is helpful for multiple reasons. There was another thing that they looked into. One of the major factors tempering their findings here is a question of

publication bias in the literature on the weapons effect. So I'll briefly explain what they called the naive meta analysis, which basically just means you average together all the results of the studies they looked at without doing any like correcting for potential biases and the results. You just take the results at face value and put them all together, look at them against one another, and see what you find.

And they found that this naive mean definitely confirmed that merely quote seeing a weapon can increase aggressive thoughts, hostile appraisals, and aggressive behavior. But they also ran a meta analysis using techniques that are designed to detect signs of publication bias. Publication bias, of course, is not a problem just with this subject. It's a major problem affecting the quality of all kinds of scientific literature, I think, especially in the

social sciences. And it basically goes like this, Studies that find a significant result are more likely to be published than studies that test for something and find no evidence, also known as a null result. And this is actually a problem because it leads to biases in the existing literature.

If Alice doesn't experiment and finds some interesting hypothesis is confirmed, and then Bob doesn't experiment, that does not yield any kind of solid conclusion, and then Alice publishes and Bob does not this, and then this kind of keeps happening. This can give us an inaccurate picture when we try

to run a meta analysis on the existing literature. UH. And this publication disparity could also potentially pressure researchers to, uh perhaps unconsciously, probably unconsciously most of the time, lean into study designs and manipulations that would try to get a significant result showing something something interesting that you can report apart from just saying like, yeah, we looked and

we didn't find anything. And this is why it's important to publish and reward well executed studies that receive a null result. And I understand the difficulty with that, Like I try to remember to mention them on the show when I come across them, but I admit it's a lot harder to make a good podcast talking about a bunch of studies that just didn't find anything interesting. So, you know, it's definitely something that modern science is struggling with.

But it's also a good thing that researchers are aware of it, looking out for it and trying to come up with ways of detecting the bias when it occurs. But anyway, with regards to this particular literature, what what did the researchers find? How how does publication bias affect the weapons effect? Well, it looks like it does not erase it, but it does appear to reduce the magnitude of it and to affect some of the conditions in

which it applies. So to read from their discussion section quote, the naive meta analysis showed that the weapons effect is quite robust. It occurred inside and outside the lab for many different kinds of weapons e g. Guns, knives, spears, swords, hand grenades, for real and toy weapon, for males and females, for college students and non students, and for people of all ages, regardless of whether they were provoked. For some distributions, the weapons effect was also robust to the influence of

publication bias and or outliers. Yet for other distributions, the weapons effect was not robust. These phenomena. The results from the sensitivity analysis, and that's the the analysis they ran to look for publication bias, showed that a publication bias had a small to moderate impact on the cognitive and appraisal outcomes. Given the difficulty in triangulating around a likely true effect size for affective and behavioral outcomes, for instance,

we recommend interpreting their mean estimates with considerable caution. So, as best I can tell from these results, it looks to me like the weapons effect is probably real on average with regards to cognition how it affects what we're thinking about, But the size of the effect maybe a good bit smaller than some studies have suggested. So so maybe a gun on the table makes your cognition a

little more violent. Yeah, they also write that quote. Overall, the magnitude of the weapons effect may even be increasing over time, although that may be due to the fact that much of this research has focused on cognitive and appraisal outcomes since the nineteen nines. That's a really interesting observation. So so there are a couple of things here. It could be an artifact of just how the studies have

evolved in their methodology and things like that. But if that is real, I wonder what would explain that If there's actually a more cognitive priming from the presence of weapons now than there were like fifty years ago, what would that mean, yeah, yeah, I'm not sure. Um you know, ultimately in the paper they acknowledge that that, yes, technically the the the adage is true, guns don't kill people. People kill people. But the research does indicate that guns

are are not neutral stimuli. Right, So you can say, even even if it's not, even if the magnitude of the weapons effect is kind of in question, it does seem to be there these it's not neutral stimuli, right. And so I think this would be a counter to anybody who who wants to argue, like, oh, a gun

is just a tool, you know, it's like whatever. No, I mean, like, if there's a gun in the room and people can see it, like their brains are going to start behaving somewhat differently, right, And and I think on on some level, I think most people realize that, like, isn't that one of the reasons you have the gun on the wall right for people to see it, or in the back of the truck or what have you. But again, the extent of which weapons actually influenced aggressive

behavior that remains debated and in need of further study. UM. I mentioned already that you can find some cases where they were not able to replicate the weapon's effect in studies. Um. And then there there's some other interesting cases as well, study from Click and mcelreth that even turned up a reverse weapons effect, which at least suggests that there there's a lot more going on than an ABC sort of

reaction to seeing a weapon. Uh. But it's also worth noting that it's pretty much impossible to fully conduct a real world test of the weapons effect, as it could potentially, you know, concern aggressive behavior. Uh. But it's it's still an ofsential stopping point in considering such topics as gun control, of violent media, and toy guns. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think this is a very interesting and fruitful realm of research. So yeah, more more on gun psychology. Absolutely.

It certainly made me think more about how many you know, manifestations of the gun I encounter in just an average day. You know, like all my hobbies seem to in some at some level or another involve the gun. Like I'm painting these little miniatures, and and yeah, there's like I was just I was counting the other day while I was at my laptop. My painting stuff was on a tray next at my laptop, and I counted like I think, uh,

counting both physical models and illustrations. In some instructions, there were like two lightsabers and something like fifteen total blaster weapons, you know. And then like if I'm playing a video game, there's often some sort of a blasting weapon or a gun. If I'm reading a book, there's often some sort of

conflict at the heart of it. You know, it's often going to have laser guns or some weapons going to show up at some point or another, or it's gonna be swords and whatnot, and even magic wands and wizard spells or ultimately some version of the weapon. Well, yeah, I mean this comes back to something I was talking about at the beginning, which is that when we let

our imaginations run wild. I mean, when we play, whether that's as children or adults, and you know, whatever the adult uh mental operations are that we call play, a lot of what we're gonna be doing is imagining potential or hypothetical conflicts. And those don't have to be violent conflicts. You sometimes people imagine arguments, people imagine you know, political squabbles and all that, but almost every good story is about conflict of some kind. And one of the major

types of conflict is violent, deadly conflict. Yeah, just to drive this home, I'm recording in a closet as usual. Well, and I just counted eleven weapons. Uh on on packaging or images or books. Uh you know that the only thing that's not not a weapon in an illustration that is I'm looking around is a box, a boxed game of Ticket to Ride and a VHS of Jerry McGuire. And that's it. There are no guns in Jerry McGuire.

It's it's it's the cinema of peace. That's true. Now, there was one really strange thing that I was reading in the meta analysis you brought up a minute ago. This is yet another thing that could just be a sort of like artifact of the existing research that isn't really robust, doesn't actually mean anything, but it could be a real discovery. And if it is, it's very intriguing to me. So to read from their paper quote, one counterintuitive finding in our analyses concerned the comparison of real

weapons and images of weapons. Specifically, the magnitude of the effect for images of weapons was larger than for real weapons. Although there is no particular theoretical reason why there should be a difference between real weapons and images of weapons. The difference was significant in the naive meta analysis, and the difference remains significant after taking publication bias and potential outliers into consideration. Perhaps participants were more suspicious when they

saw real weapons. I mean, that seems sensible to me. Yeah, uh so, maybe you're saying more so. I think the idea more suspicious is that people's genuine reactions were maybe tempered in an experiment where there's a real gun on the table because they feel like something's wrong here. You know, that I'm being provoked or like, you know that they detect the priming, they start to understand what the experiment

is testing for which they shouldn't in a well designed experiment. Um, and that affects what they actually report in the end. That's possibility. Another thing is just that, yeah, it emerges as some other strange artifact. But if that were a

real effect, I would wonder what could explain that. I mean, would people actually be more primed to think host to to like perceive hostility, and to think aggressive and violent thoughts when they look at a picture of a gun rather than when when they see a physical gun sitting in front of them. Yeah, I mean I guess. I mean, the the obvious answer that comes to mind that might not actually line up all that well is just you know,

it is it is reality. It is a thing that I can pick up and it will become it would become a part of my body schema, you know. And it is also something that can can I have used the right way or the wrong way, depending on how you want to look at it. Uh, could hurt me, whereas the picture of the gun is not going to hurt me. So you're saying that maybe the picture what's

the logic there? You're saying, maybe the picture of the gun is just like would give you more freedom to explore dangerous aggressive thoughts because there's not actually something you need to be cautious about in your environment. I don't know, like I said, I don't know if this this actually has any any meat to it. Yeah, but uh yeah, I mean, you know, certainly we can we can sort of bring in our own, um, you know, personal experience, like the difference between seeing a picture of a gun

and seeing somebody, say with a gun. You know. But oh yeah, I guess now that I think about it, Okay, So I can imagine, like I watch a scene of violence in a movie and I can get like, I can get pumped up about it. I'm like, yeah, time to fight. If I were to watch the same scene of violence play out in physical reality, like on the street, I would be like, oh my god, I've got to

get away from here. So, like maybe the physical reality of the weapon um produces a different a different cognitive response, because like when it's just an image, you're more likely to start fantasizing about violence, and when it's a physical reality, you're more likely to respond with hesitation and caution. All that. Yeah, all right, well at this point, let's get back into the discussion of aggressive play versus aggressive behavior with children.

A really great, great source that I enjoyed reading for this is an article that popped up on Slate and from Melinda Winner Moyer, a science journalist science author who I feel like you've probably if you've definitely encountered her work before. She's been published in a number of different

major publications. She's written some books on parenting, and this particular article is titled It's Fine for kids to play with pretend guns, which I suppose that kind of gives away the overall answers that she presents in the article.

But it's a great article, and it touches on some of the key gun safety principles and modern parenting, you know, such as not only properly storing guns and AMMO separately in a household, but also inquiring about gun safety at any house that your child might be going over to. Uh and how uh. You know, parents have have been pushing to just sort of make this a regular and not weird part of our discourse where you know, as as not weird as it can be, you know, it's

just something you ask, something you inquire about. Um. And you know this, added with the reality that gun safety education is only so effective in preventing children from handling or playing with real firearms, you have given the opportunity, which which is interesting to note because again coming back to how we think about our own lives versus the statistics, it's easy to think, well, well, my child knows the difference between a real gun and a fake gun, or

my child, I've gone over some of the safety tips, you know, maybe I've even a roll and roll the child in some sort of class. They're going to know how to be safe with a gun. But it doesn't look like the research actually lines up with this, um and there have been some very recent studies on this to back it up. Study from Rutgers University found that gun safety programs do not prevent children from handling firearms.

And then there was also a presentation at the American Academy of Pediatrics there two thousand eighteen National Conference and Exhibition UH that found that most children surveyed couldn't tell real guns from toy guns. Yeah, I was reading about that one. Actually, that's a and and here's a question came up in our children who see movie characters using

guns more likely to use them. Well, this particular study published in UM Jam of Pediatrics found that children who watched a PG rated movie clip containing guns played with a disabled real gun longer and pulled the trigger more often than children who saw the same movie not containing guns. Not super surprising. Kids love to act out scenes from movies that they've liked. Yeah, and I bring us up

to that. I think it's all good information to have in your head regarding your expectations of even your own perfect child. You know, Um, this is just kids. Statistically based on these studies, now Alayer goes goes on from all this, the points out that you know, first of all,

aggression play is of course normal and especially noted among boys. Uh. And and in in boys and among boys, you know, in individual boys, but then also when boys play together in two thousan In a two thousand thirteen study from Fair and Russ Early Education and Development is the publication, the researchers found that preschoolers who engaged in oral aggression play such as having one stuffed animal bite the hell out of another stuffed animal. Uh, these children were less

aggressive in the classroom. And the speculation here is the more violence that kids incorporate into their pretend play, the more they may learn to control violent impulses in real life and control their own emotions. And uh and you've

seen even stronger emphasis on all of this. Two thousand thirteen paper by Heart and Tannic published in Children Australia even speculated that we may be interfering with a child's social, emotional, physical, cognitive and communicative development if we try to prevent them from play fighting and engaging in this kind of like creative play aggression. Now, there's some caveats here that Air

points out. First of all, if a child is actually hurting other kids during play fighting, then there may be some impulse control issues there. It might be something that requires further attention. It also might be of concern if there is no imagination involved in the process, if it is, as Moyer puts it, a case of a child simply hitting one toy with the other over and over again. So narrative ultimately seems to be important. Part of all

of this also makes sense. Yeah, so the creation of violent or war narrative seems to be key, Moyer says, because mirror imitation, let's say, recreating a key battle scene from Star Wars is not engaging in the sort of

play that actually works out problems. And I have to say I found this pretty interesting, you know, from a personal standpoint, but also just looking at toys, because there are a lot of toys and play sets out there that that aim that that sell themselves on providing you with the tools to just recreate pivotal scenes in a lot of movies. Um, it's certainly the case with say Star Wars and Lego for example. You know you'll find sets that are all about like key duels, key action scenes,

but it may not be that wrote. Reproduction of key scenes, that's important, But the creation of different narratives, well, I gotta say, and unfortunately this is just anecdotal again, but you know, in my memory of childhood, there was a ton of recreating with toys and just out of pure imagination play in both cases just recreating scenes directly from movies, but also a lot of times I feel like that

type of play would evolve. So you would start by recreating a scene in a movie with legos or with toys, and then it would turn into what happens next, and

then from there you just sort of branch out. Yeah, yeah, I I definitely see this in my own son, Like I remember him building this, putting up a battle scene with legos and he was like, Dad, this is the second battle of Genosis, and I was like, all right, and uh, but then it it did evolved from there to where now it's it's a different battle scene every time I go in into his room, and they're often these little side things he's set up where it's like

Clone troopers camping and looking after an animal or some other like. It's it's kind of an interesting puzzle to try and put together the narratives that he's clearly playing out in all of these little scenes. Are they ever looking over a baby Yoda. We don't have a baby Yoda yet, so maybe maybe by by the time Christmas rolls around, they'll be a little baby Yoda Yoda for them to interact with. What do you think? What do you think the next Star Wars baby is going to be.

So we've had baby Yoda, I'm thinking about baby Darth Maul. Can you get a baby Darth Maul? Well, yeah, you could definitely have a baby of his species. I mean on the Clone War series you had a baby hut you had a hutlet and that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay, I guess I gotta watch this. Yeah. I said that a bunch of times on the show. Now, my son informs me that in some Star Wars lego show there's a baby Wampa that's super adorable as well. So I mean, really, you make a baby out of anything in the Star

Wars universe versus going to be adorable. But you at that Wampa. It's cute. When it's a baby, it starts to grow up. You can't just flush it down the toilet like an alligator. Don't do that to alligators. By

the way, don't buy baby alligators, but or baby wampath. Now, now this isn't to say that parents can't or shouldn't enter into this sort of thing, that they shouldn't interrupt or maybe not interrupt, but but at least, uh, you know, converse with their child about these sort of holy experiments and conflict play. Um and Moyer sites Diane Levin, an early in education specialist at at Wheelock College in Boston

UH and the author of the war play Dilemma. Levin says that you can you can ask follow up questions to statements about, say, killing bad guys, with questions like, well, what did the bad guy do? Is there anything else that can be done besides killing the bad guy? Uh? You know, there are conversations you can have about conflict, in the nature of conflict and how this imagined conflict

lines up with real life. Plus they point out that trying to prevent things like unplay, you know, are likely to backfire anyway, making it more desirable, So it's best to engage in conversations about it, like it's better to have the conflict play is allowed, but it's something we can have conversations about. So that we can you know, you can have these these important conversations about how real conflict works and the ramifications of violence in the real world. Yeah,

you don't want to just send the gun play underground. Yeah, now. I think it's also worth noting that some of this would seem to go far beyond anything specifically involving guns and weapons. For instance, a June study from the University of Cambridge found that children's children whose fathers make time to play with them from a very early age may find it easier to control their behavior and emotions as

they grow up. And the key distinction here, and I think I think one worth pointing out for single parents and same the same sex parents is that it's not it's not about the you know, the gender of the father, etcetera. It's about a more physical play style and stuff like quote tickling, chasing and piggy act rides. But this studying question looked at forty years of research and found quote a consistent correlation between father child play and children's subsequent

ability to control their feelings. So play more in the domain of rough housing maybe sometimes helps children understand understand

boundaries better and and control their their outbursts. And impulses. Yeah, and so like this is me, not the study, but I instantly think of the times when I've been kind of playing rough with the kiddo and I get kind of clocked, you know, or something ends up really hurting, Like like maybe that kind of thing is a part of of understanding like you know, restraint and the boundaries

of physical aggression, etcetera. You find out what too rough is by by like going there with a responsible adult present, right, all right, well we're gonna go and close it out there. Um. You know, hopefully this gave everybody a little food for thought, and we would love to hear from everybody out there if you have any thoughts on what we discussed tire today, you know, especially in and around the holidays, when inevitably there's gonna there are going to be toy weapons under

the tree. They might be human size, they might be very miniature. Uh they might be for grown ups, they might be for kids. But you know, what are we supposed to do with that? How are we supposed to to think about these things? Uh? So I thought it was a good a good episode to roll out this time of year. Oh man, what we didn't even get into toy weapons for adults, such as like what do you call it when like an adult person buys a buys a sword. They're not planning on using it in battle.

They just wanted to have it. Yeah, that you want to put it on the wall, which, of course you know if you if you think about the weapons effect, Yeah, that that means every time I walk into the living room, I'm gonna be touched by the weapons effect, right, Um, it's yeah, it's it's interesting. I mean then also, you're if you buy that sword to put on the wall, you are going to hold it at some point if you, um, you might film yourself on your phone doing tricks of it. Yeah,

it's it's gonna happen. Um, if you have a rental house and you put on like Airbnb or something, and you have a sword on the wall, people who stay there are going to try and take the sword off the wall. It's it's they're they're gonna go for it. Even if it's fixed in place, it's gonna be back the sword, the stone bolt, that sucker down. Yeah, all right, we're gonna go and close it out then. Um. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes

of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. You can find us wherever you get your podcast, wherever that happens to be. We just hope that you rate, review, and subscribe. Episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have some other shorter content that comes out on Monday's and Wednesdays Fridays that's gonna be weird, how cinema and then what on Saturday you get a repeat episode. So it's a full, a full menu of possibilities.

Your audio stockings are stuffed anyway, huge things as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello, you canmail us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.

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