Why Do Video Games Cause Violent Behavior?

Videogames are a seemingly controversial topic, some people say that they have a direct affect on behavior and cause a more aggressive mental state. Videogames have many faces and not all of them are bad. I feel that saying video games promote and directly cause violent tendencies is not the whole truth. Videogames can be therapeutic to some and a source of happiness to many others. While videogames can be very violent, some to an extreme extent this is not all video games. Along with the fact that not everybody will react to violence the same way, and If i may speak from my own personal exp. I will say that i have never seen one of my friends or myself change our behavior while playing video games in a major way. Now people get frustrated while playing games but that happens with much more than just video games. I've seen people flip tables over a game of chess. My point being that …show more content…
Just because people can draw connections to videogames and violence like in this article “Short-term exposure increases the likelihood of physically and verbally aggressive behavior, aggressive thoughts, and aggressive emotions” (Craig A Anderson) Just because they draw the connection doesn't mean that is the case all of the time. Just because they draw some form of correlation doesn’t mean that it will actually happen. The idea of “correlation doesn’t equal causation” is been used in many setting and is explained very well in this quote “"Correlation does not imply causation" is a phrase used in statistics to emphasize that a correlation between two variables does not imply that one causes the other. Many statistical tests calculate correlation between variables. A few go further, using correlation as a basis for testing a hypothesis of a true causal relationship; examples are the Granger causality test and convergent cross mapping. Along with this videogames are more than just a