From the Vault: Toy Guns

For many of us, toy guns were part of our childhood, but how are we to think about them today? In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe look at some of the current thinking on the use of toy weapons in childhood play. (originally published 12/22/2020)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In today's episode is
from the vault. It is an episode that we did
last year on toy Guns. Originally published December twenty two.
All right, well, let's unwrap it and uh and have
a go at it. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind,

(00:27):
production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick. And Rob I've got a question for you
to start off with today. I want to know if you,
as a child had a toy that I also had.

(00:49):
I think it was really common and I got it
for Christmas one year, I remember, and what it was
was a a plastic alien pistol that when you pulled
the trigger, it would play one of a sequence of
like five 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? And

(01:11):
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

(01:33):
the exact one you had, but I must have had
like an earlier model, because I had one that 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

(01:54):
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

(02:15):
on this thing. They just win 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
times 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

(02:36):
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're never sure, um, yeah, you it's

(02:58):
apparent 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

(03:19):
the sound effects more often for longer durations, and the
parents will slowly lose their minds. And of course it's
also written 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
regun to go, Pu pu, you don't need the lightsaber
to go because we can do those sound effects. We

(03:41):
do them all the time. Um. In fact, I think
I read that that they had to get onto 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, anaka,
I have the high ground. M yep, I think so.

(04:05):
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

(04:26):
it's proven impossible to ignore the specter of the gun. Um.
You know, it's it's everywhere it was in 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

(04:49):
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,

(05:10):
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 obvious 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

(05:32):
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 wanna 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

(05:53):
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, there's 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, I mean, you know, conflict play

(06:13):
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,

(06:35):
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 realm of fantasy,
you know, if you know, if if you're fortunate and uh,

(06:56):
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,
it becomes this this this labyrinth, this maze that you
try and figure your way out of. So this is

(07:17):
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

(07:39):
thousand three deaths from firearm violence in and that accounted
for homicides and 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,

(07:59):
gun purchases surged over the summer in 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 d seventy eight mass shootings in the country,

(08:21):
already ahead of the total four hundred 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 in recent memory. Yeah, I mean, as as a parent,
it is it is at once terrifying and then terrifyingly

(08:44):
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 anyways, as far as
children and guns go, some more stats here. At two

(09:05):
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 and 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, an average
of eight kids shot per day um if you average

(09:26):
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

(09:46):
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 homeloaded? And questions like that. Um,
It's it's strange how people can know what the risks

(10:09):
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

(10:30):
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

(10:51):
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 any growing up that was engaged in a
firearm related accident or the accidental 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,

(11:13):
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 tendency 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

(11:37):
the stats go, we could we could keep going on
and on about this and torturing the numbers, but and
there're ultimately 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 a 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

(11:59):
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

(12:20):
a sword or spear or what have you, but very
often a gun. And even if 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

(12:41):
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.

(13:02):
You know, what we have We can certainly go on
about about that that topic as well. But but of
course sorry that that's ancillarty 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 conflict play

(13:23):
among kids. It doesn't seem like something 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,

(13:45):
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 there's there's 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

(14:07):
never let them 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

(14:29):
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

(14:50):
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 as
shoe blasters, and and we'll only you know, you can

(15:11):
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 a lightsaber because even though I'm
not being you know, shot at in the allway, 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

(15:31):
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 in their imagination. As Jeffrey Goldstein of

(15:52):
the University of you Trek and 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

(16:17):
children use in play fighting and fantasy aggression, including but
not limited to, toys that resemble weapons, 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 that looks like nothing you would actually use
in a real world combat scenario. Same case a tiny

(16:39):
blaster and a Lego mini mini figures hand yep that
applies Lego blocks formed roughly into the shape of a gun.
The same thing, a 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 may be overstating it,
but it is weird. Also the I wonder how much

(17:01):
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

(17:21):
it was what from Russia with Love? And there's the
whole thing he 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,
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.

(17:44):
What did you also make yourself a like a Robert
Shaw garatte 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

(18:04):
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

(18:25):
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 uh gun weapons, you know, particularly like in nerve toys.
So there's a lot to consider just in this category

(18:47):
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 that us of play is
uh present regardless of gender, but it's more common in
boys now. Goldstein pointed out that warplay usually begins around

(19:08):
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 uh yes, is
for that, so I'm gonna have to pass. I like that,

(19:30):
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

(19:53):
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 is 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

(20:14):
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 non violent way with some rule limitations, but they
kind of fulfill the same um 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,

(20:36):
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

(20:57):
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,

(21:19):
I guess part of it is when you see kids play,
a lot of it comes down to this sort of
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 is

(21:40):
gonna bring the finger gun and 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. Know what are we gonna do now? But

(22:01):
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 is imaginative conflict play, but when when
some kid wants to turn everything into an imagined violent conflict,
then it's like, Okay, that's not fun anymore. Yeah, yeah,

(22:21):
And then I don't remember if it was explicitly stated
or if it was even implied, but I 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 are made in
one of the sources we looked at for this episode.

(22:42):
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 golds Steam points to
a trio of studies from the ninety nineties that that
indicate that war games and video games with violent themes
increase the frequency and duration of aggressive play. But the

(23:05):
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 that 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

(23:26):
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 a whole area
we'll have to consider coming back to in the future.
But uh, I've got a good place to go from

(23:48):
here would be to travel back to nine 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

(24:10):
of these participants was always a secret accompliments accomplice of
the testers. So you only really have one random individual one,
you know, the purer college student that's in here and
is being tested. 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

(24:31):
turns engaging in a mundane task such as the example
of that that I saw listed was uh, 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

(24:51):
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, so that's again that's the
fake test subject shocking the actual test subject. But then

(25:15):
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

(25:36):
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

(25:58):
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.

(26:18):
Oh man, I can forgot about that episode, but it
comes up in several 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

(26:40):
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 were aggressive within the boundaries of

(27:02):
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

(27:22):
something 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,

(27:47):
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

(28:11):
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 Burkowitz,
is associated with an anti metaboli that he used to
communicate the results that he said he found here, and
the anti metaboli was, yes, it's true that the finger
pulls the trigger, but sometimes the trigger also pulls the finger. Yes, Yeah,

(28:36):
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 isn't 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

(28:59):
what's known as price aiming, 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

(29:22):
of the question would be, how does this uh supposed
priming effect 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

(29:42):
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 psycholo Gy Review. In it, as the title implies,

(30:02):
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 but these are the big takeaways

(30:23):
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

(30:46):
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,

(31:06):
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

(31:27):
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

(31:49):
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 objective 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,

(32:12):
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

(32:33):
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,

(32:53):
and aggressive behavior. But they also ran a meta analysis
using techniques that are designed to techt 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

(33:15):
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,

(33:36):
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 that this publication disparity could also potentially pressure researchers

(33:56):
to UH perhaps unconsciously, probably unconsciously to the time, lean
into UH 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

(34:21):
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

(34:42):
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

(35:04):
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 weapons, for males and females,

(35:24):
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

(35:46):
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 behave of your outcomes
for instance, we recommend interpreting their mean estimates with considerable caution.

(36:06):
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,

(36:29):
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 nineties. 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

(36:50):
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

(37:15):
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,

(37:36):
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

(37:57):
behavior that remains debated and in need of further study. UM.
I mentioned already that you can find some cases where, uh,
they were not able to replicate the weapons 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

(38:19):
a lot more going on than an ABC sort of
reaction to seeing a weapon. But it's also worth noting
that it's pretty much impossible to fully conduct a real
world test off the weapons effect, as it could potentially,
you know, concern aggressive behavior. Uh, but it's it's still
an official stopping point in considering such topics as gun control,

(38:39):
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 a gun I encounter in just an average day,
you know, like all my hobbies see too, in some

(39:01):
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 to my laptop, and I counted, like I think, uh,
counting both physical models and illustrations and some instructions. There
were like two lightsabers and something like fifteen total blaster weapons,

(39:24):
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 or some weapons gonna
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,

(39:45):
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.

(40:05):
You sometimes people imagine arguments that 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, I
just to drive this time. I'm recording in a closet
as usual, and I just counted eleven weapons uh on

(40:27):
on packaging or images or books. Uh you know, that's
the only thing is not not a weapon in an
illustration then as I'm looking around, or 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 I guess it's the cinema

(40:48):
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
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

(41:08):
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

(41:30):
weapons and images of weapons, the difference was significant in
the naive meta analysis, and the difference remain 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

(41:51):
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 and 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

(42:11):
which they shouldn't in a well designed experiment, um, and
that affects what they actually report in the end. That's
a possibility another thing is just that. Yeah, it emerges
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

(42:32):
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 obvious answer that comes to mind, it 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

(42:53):
become a part of my body schema, you know. And
it is also something that can can you have you
have used the right way or the wrong way, depending
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

(43:14):
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

(43:35):
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,

(43:57):
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, caution, all that. Yeah,

(44:24):
thank 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 in
from Melinda Winner Moyer a science journalists science author who
I feel like you've probably if you've definitely encountered her

(44:47):
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 a 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

(45:09):
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, or 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

(45:32):
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,

(45:53):
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 yuh, 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.

(46:15):
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 twenty seventeen. Are children who see movie

(46:36):
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

(46:58):
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, a lawyer
goes goes on from all this, the points out that
you know, first of all, aggression play is of course

(47:18):
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 thousand,
two thirteen study from Fair and Russ Early Education and
Development is the publication. The research has found that preschoolers
who engaged in oral aggression play, such as having one

(47:39):
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

(48:02):
of this a two thousand thirteen paper by Heart and
Tannic published in Children Australia even speculated that we may
be interfering with a child 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 that Moyer points out.

(48:23):
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 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.

(48:43):
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 seen
from Star Wars is not engage in the sort of
play that actually works out problems. And I have to

(49:04):
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.

(49:28):
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

(49:49):
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

(50:11):
up a battle scene with Legos and he was like, Dad,
this is the second battle of Enosis, 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 into his room and
they're off in 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

(50:32):
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

(50:53):
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

(51:15):
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 versu it's going to be adorable. But you
get 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 wampa. Now,

(51:35):
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 and education specialist at Wheelock College in Boston, UH

(51:57):
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

(52:18):
lines up with real life. Plus, they point out that
trying to prevent things like gun play, you know, are
likely to backfire anyway, making it more desirable. So it's
best to engage in conversations about it, like it 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

(52:39):
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 father make time

(53:00):
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 saying 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

(53:20):
quote tickling, chasing, and piggyback 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

(53:42):
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, restrain and the boundaries

(54:04):
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 just gave everybody a little you know,
food for thought, and we would love to hear from
everybody out there if you have any thoughts on what
we discussed here today, you know, especially in and around

(54:25):
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. One we

(54:46):
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 a 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

(55:08):
the weapons effect, right, Um, it's yeah, it's it's interesting.
I mean then also, you 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 with 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

(55:29):
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 like the sword
in 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.

(55:50):
We just hope that you rate, review, and subscribe. Episodes
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Your audio stockings are stuffed anyway, huge thanks as always

(56:14):
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(56:36):
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