Study finds 'conclusive evidence' of games/violence link?
by Tateru Nino 
Nov 5th 2008 at 10:00AM
Filed under: Culture, News items, Opinion, Academic
Iowa State University's Craig Anderson has led a study which claims 'conclusive evidence' of a link between violent video games and increased aggression in children. The findings (and indeed the validity of the study) have been challenged by Christopher Ferguson whose research at Texas A&M International University has found the opposite.
Ferguson finds a number of flaws in the Iowa State study, which he says demonstrates only "weak correlations". We can spot a few of our own. For example there is no definitive usefully testable method for determining aggressive tendencies. By failing to factor in extraneous variables, the study results could quite easily be interpreted to indicate that aggressive tendencies cause kids to spend more time playing violent video games. Just because two things are correlated does not mean that one causes the other. The majority of dead people have eaten meat. That doesn't mean that meat kills people.
