Brad J. Bushman, a psychologist who studies the effects of TV and video game violence, recently joined Robert D. Ridge, Enny Das, Colin W. Key, and Gregory M. Busath in testing the question. They took some Godful students at Brigham Young University and some atheist students at a university in Amsterdam and split them into two groups. Half heard a story about how an Israelite couple visited the town of Gibeah, where the townspeople raped and beat the woman to death. The Israelites retaliated by attacking the town. The other half heard the same story, but with an additional paragraph noting that God endorsed the retaliation.

Then the students were placed in a competitive game where they could blast noises into the ears of their opponents of variable volume. For students who believed in God, those who heard the passage in which God endorsed the retaliation made the noises as loud as possible twice as often as those who only heard the violent story. For students who did not believe in God, the increase was 40%.

• Read the paper
• Read the write-up in Nature
• More Brad Bushman studies