When ‘exciting’ trumps ‘honest’, traditional academic journals encourage bad science

When ‘exciting’ trumps ‘honest’, traditional academic journals encourage bad science
Imagine you’re a scientist. You’re interested in testing the hypothesis that playing violent video games makes people more likely to be violent in real life. This is a straightforward theory, but there are still many, many different ways you could test it. First you have to decide which games count as “violent”. Does Super Mario Brothers count because you kill Goombas? Or do you only count “realistic” games like Call of Duty? Next you have to decide how to measure violent behaviour. Real violence is rare and difficult to measure, so you’ll probably need to look at lower-level “aggressive” acts – but which ones?