Do video games make people violent? The dispatch from the APA back in March certainly seems to indicate that it thinks so, which runs counter to what even researchers connected to the studies cited believed. But a new meta-analysis released on the Royal Society site went through 28 different studies and analyzed the data from all of them to see if a connection could be found.
Turns out that the meta-analysis revealed quite the opposite. Not only did the individual studies show a very poor and potentially irrelevant correlation between short-term aggression and video games, the correlation grew even weaker the larger the sample sizes and the longer the period of data collection went on. Obviously, this is not in and of itself a nail in the coffin for the notion, because that’s not how science works; however, it seems to pretty solidly indicate that the correlation just isn’t there to support the claim.
