Correlation, Causation, Violent Video Games... And Church
from the drawing-conclusions dept
While some have been quick to link all sorts of violent video games to crimes committed by teens, there's plenty to suggest they're not the problem. To make a similar point, someone has noticed that a number of recent mass murderers were religious church-goers, yet no one is blaming church for their killing sprees -- nor should they. It's easy to show a correlation. It's much more difficult to prove that one thing really resulted in the other.
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But what if correlation does reflect causation?
Nobody has actually proved that smoking causes cancer, but experiments with cell cultures on petri dishes exposed to smoke, experiments on animals, and what is known about the chemistry of smoke, the biochemistry of cells, supports very strong evidence for a causative link.
There is extensive evidence, from before the time of video games, to show that children who are exposed to violent imagery tend to become more violent themselves. There are, indeed, cases where individuals who went on murder rampages openly acknowledged that they were influenced by video games. During the Vietnam War, the US army showed violent films to new recruits to desensitize them to violence. The trend continues today, in which the US army offers free downloads of war games.
The real issue here is the odds ratio: given a logistic regression in which we measure a binary outcome of serial killer vs. non-serial killer, will playing more hours of video games increase the odds ratio of a serial-killer-positive outcome? Is there an interaction between age and hours of video games played per day? How violent was the video game? Both common sense and extensive psychological evidence suggest that young kids who are exposed to violent imagery all day are at increased risk of violent behavior.
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No Subject Given
Perhaps we should. Look into profiling serial kilers and specific actions by parental roles found in very high correlation in the background of SKs. Then look at the relationship between the church and it's attendees. OK, semi-anecdotal... but the similarities are striking.
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