Violent video games desensitize individuals to real violence

When people are given repeated and long term exposure to media and video game violence they become aroused by the violence via a number of physiological and hormonal cues. Aggression is one of them. It's accurate to suggest that after exposure to violent video games adolescents and young adults do become aggressive. The effect wears off after about half an hour. The same effect is witnessed when people are exposed to pornography. Rape proclivity (similar questionnaire style psychology test of appropriate vs. inappropriate responses) and hormone levels spike and return to normal after about half an hour. The study you cite supposes that it can draw this short term spike of adrenaline into a long term correlation via "delinquency". You want to know why long term exposure to video games results in declines of academic performance? --- BECAUSE THEY ARE PLAYING VIDEO GAMES ALL THE TIME!!!! Exposures to sex-materials and exposure towards violent materials do have a notably short term effect of sex and violent related activity. If you get somebody riled up, it takes a little bit of time for them to settle down. This isn't some kind of long term psychological scarring, it's hormones. If you expose people to sex they're okay with sex. If you expose people to violence they're okay with violence. These hold true for half an hour with a notably steady drop off throughout. ---- You need to establish that violent video games desensitize individuals to real violence. So far you've established: * People process video game violence in the same way as video violence. * You can rile a person up with video games. * If students play video games all the time they do worse in school. Are you going to cite a study with some direct relevance to the topic next? ---- These studies and this topic has been explored for decades and to date there's no good evidence to support the hypothesis and not for a lack of trying. It's become a joke of made for TV movies and school kids the world over. The idea that some kid is going to play GTA and car jack somebody and drive over a large number of people (fewer than ten if you want to avoid getting three stars) is simply wrong. The way kids figure this out without any fancy psychology PhDs? They play violent video games and would never do such a thing. No amount of psychology papers could possibly put that asunder. No amount of desperate attempts by psychologists trying to prove a link that they absolutely want to find is going to make a link suddenly appear. In the harder sciences when have a hypothesis and it fails, you look somewhere else, you don't keep searching for the next 20 years. The studies are going backwards. They assume that there must be a link and go about searching everywhere for it, they aren't trying to understand some underlying mechanism or odd effect they witnessed. They are making a conclusion and desperately seeking science to back it up. However, when we look at the bigger picture and compare populations to see if there is some effect there, we don't find it. There is more violent video games in Japan, and if you've ever seen Anime you'd know that there's plenty of video violence as well, however Japan still has nearly no violent crime. There's very little point in doing research to find the mechanisms behind something that can't even make a statistical dent. I'm sorry but you're wrong. I get the feeling that you're passionate about this and I don't mean to offend, but violent video games aren't making kids violent. It doesn't matter how many video games kids play, you threaten them with real death and expose them to real violence and they act the same way: scared.