The very definition of Junk Science
Univerisyt of Missouri-Columbia study on video games is claimed to “goes some way towards demonstrating a causal link between computer games and violence”.
Of course, even the excerpts of the study do no such thing. The very first reference is testing people who have been playing games for years. And they measure the response to “violent images”. And they conclude that since the reaction to images of real-life violence don’t inspire revulsion, that the people have become “desensitized to violence”, and therefore are more violent themselves.
Except there is not one single statistic that bears this out. If video games were making people more violent, wouldn’t the incidence of violent crimes be up? Wouldn’t there be more shootings, more beatings, more robberies? I mean, if everyone was emulating Sonny in Grand Theft Auto, there ought to be dead prostitutes littering the streets, right?
But there aren’t.
What we have here is yet another in a long line of politically-motivated “studies” that are trying to prove a correlation between consumption of violent media and violent behaviour. And they then take any hint of correlation and immediately assign the causality that the video games must have made the person violent.
Of course, since these are all improperly controlled studies, they never manage to disprove the opposite causality, which is that perhaps violent people are drawn to violent media. And by carefully avoiding any real-world results, and instead relying upon brain scans, they can say that a person who has violent thoughts is ipso facto violent, even if that person never commits a violent act against another.
And so therefore, I call bullshit. If I feel so inclined, I’ll read the whole report that was produced, but I suspect I’ll be able to tear it apart in a matter of minutes. Although it might be fun to thoroughly fisk something like this - especially if it’s been peer-reviewed.