dallasfaniac;2115823 said:
This forum isn't big enough, lol. I am not discounting all of his arguments, but many are based upon correlative studies which really don't tell us anything. Selling more ice cream doesn't cause sharks to attack people, yet both see increases at the same time of year. I could make an incorrect correlation myself; ultra violent video games really started hitting the shelves in the mid 90s, right when juvenile crime rates began falling.
Needless to say, violence has been around long before video games. Kids often see increased aggression when another child enters the room, let alone when being subjected to violent behavior from video games, tv, comic books, novels or their own imagination. With 70 million killing trainers sold, we should see much more violence than we are seeing.
There is correlational data.
But there are also data from controlled experiments that clearly demonstrate that playing violent video games LEADS to more aggression
You can talk about correlation not leading to causation all you want -- but strong programs of research employ both correlational and experimental evidence. Some aspects you simply can't examine experimentally -- like chronic exposure to violent games -- but when you demonstrate that randomly assigned participants who playing violent games come out more aggressive than a control group who played non-violent games then your experimental evidence makes a strong case for the direction of the relationship observed in the correlational studies.
I'd point you to this article for a nice overview: Media violence and the American public: Scientific facts versus media misinformation.
Bushman, Brad J.1; Anderson, Craig A.
American Psychologist. Vol 56(6-7), Jun-Jul 2001, pp. 477-489
The authors also have an article that year in Psychological Science that is a bit more technical (i.e., statistical)
The American Psychologist and Psychological Science, BTW are among the most selective outlets in the behavioral sciences.
