It is really amazing how many psychology studies that try to address the effects of media end up making the mistake that they equate fiction and reality as the

It is really amazing how many psychology studies that try to address the effects of media end up making the mistake that they equate fiction and reality as the same thing. They show people violent videos, and immediately start talking about "witnessing violence" in order to convince people that the difference between real violence and violent imagery is irrelevant. In this study, they equate presenting violent concepts for inclusion in fiction as being indistinguishable from actual aggressive action. A great deal of the social discussion surrounding violent media is poisoned by people who insist on denying that there is a difference between fiction and reality, or, more often, using words with two radically different meanings. They say something like "children have sex with hookers and then run over them, murdering them" in their description of a videogame. They are not claiming, of course, that the players physically did have sex or murder anyone, but they realy ENTIRELY upon you assigning the same negative connotations to the actions as you would to the real physical actions. If you stop and ask why murder is wrong when it involves two fictional characters, you either quickly find out that it simply isn't, or that the person speaking has no capacity to define WHY murder is wrong in the first place and so bases their entire worldview on seeing words like "murder" as a quasi-mystical totem portending danger.