In the 1980s there was a widespread conspiracy theory that young people who played the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons were prone to murder and suicide.
There was the tale of Irving Pulling, an avid player of the role-playing game who, at 17, killed himself after returning home from his Hanover County high school. He left a bizarre suicide note.
Before that was the story of James Dallas Egbert, a child prodigy who enrolled in college at 16 and disappeared from Michigan State University, leaving an ominous note some perceived to mean he had killed himself. He, too, was a fan of Dungeons & Dragons.
The two cases came at a time when the United States was in the throes of “Satanic Panic.” Halloween candy was being tampered with. The media fanned tales of cult activities and child abuse. The Dungeons & Dragons murder/suicide theory was even featured in a 1985 segment on the television news magazine “60 Minutes.”
There was just one problem. The theory, so widely believed, was wrong.
All it would have taken to debunk the idea was to look at the numbers. But as James Zimring says in his new book, “Partial Truths: How Fractions Distort Our Thinking,” humans generally are not great at understanding the likelihood of things.
“One of the reasons is we are storytelling creatures who predominantly use anecdotal evidence, and we are not prone to expect or seek out broad statistical data that gives the full picture of a circumstance,” said Zimring, the University of Virginia’s Thomas W. Tillack Professor of Pathology. “Misunderstanding probability has really bad outcomes.”
The Numbers Tell a Different Story
Over about five years in the 1980s there were 28 cases of adolescents who played Dungeons & Dragons and later committed murder or suicide. Then came a loud public outcry to ban the game.
“That’s a very human thing to do and it’s a good thing to do, right? Because observations begin with anecdotal evidence,” Zimring said. “If there’s an association of kids dying, we should pay attention to it.
“By 1984, 3 million teenagers were playing Dungeons & Dragons in the United States and the baseline suicide rate of adolescents overall would have been about 360 suicides each year,” he said. “So, when you look at the bottom of the fraction, at the denominator, Dungeons & Dragons was, if anything, protective. It had had the opposite effect.”
In other words, kids who played Dungeons & Dragons were less likely to commit suicide than teens as a whole.
Original source can be found here.
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