Trump Is Concerned About Violent Video Games, But Do They Cause Violence?

There have been a few studies that link violent video games with violent behaviour, but Western Michigan University associate professor of sociology Whitney DeCamp reckons that research doesn't stack up.

"This evidence, however, is often correlational in nature, and the presence of a correlation does not necessarily equate to that of a causal link."

"Although causality is adequately proven through the use of random assignment in these studies, the applicability to violent behaviour is not certain."

That's the crux of the criticism of a lot of studies or research. Just because you found a link between A and B, doesn't necessarily mean that A causes B or vise versa. There's even a website called Spurious Correlations, which shows there are figures which align which each other, but no one in a million years would believe they are related.

Or are they?

Funnily enough, there have been figures that show crime rates tend to drop when shooting game sales are at their highest.

Stetson University associate professor and co-chairman of the Department of Psychology Christopher Ferguson reckons that's because people are genuinely too busy playing games to commit crimes.

"Basically, by keeping young males busy with things they like you keep them off the streets and out of trouble."

"We argue that since laboratory experiments have not examined the time use effects of video games," they said, "which incapacitate violent activity by drawing individual gamers into extended gameplay, laboratory studies may be poor predictors of the net effects of violent video games in society."