Many things correlate to drops in real-world violence. Heat correlates with increases in violence; that is not a reason to depopulate the equator and colonize t

Many things correlate to drops in real-world violence. Heat correlates with increases in violence; that is not a reason to depopulate the equator and colonize the Antarctic. In general, the reinforcement learning present in humans mean that neural systems that are activated more are more influential, easier to activate, etc.. Exposure to violent media unsurprisingly results in increased availability (basically, increased access speed) of violent cognitions and behaviors, and lowered emotional responses (which is not a good thing -- it is very good to be disgusted at violent images, this is indicative of a trait called empathy which can be very adaptive in even the modern world). Humans are not designed, evolutionarily, to disbelieve things we see. In our evolutionary environment, everything we saw was real. Special effects did not exist. It is actually cognitively effortful to disbelieve -- making research participants complete distractor tasks while having them discriminate between information marked, explicitly, as true or false causes them to be less accurate at judging. When you see a video game character kill someone and experience reward, that is an observational learning experience that is associating positive valence with violent behaviors. Within the scientific community there's virtually no disagreement on this topic. Denying it is in the same class as denying climate change. There is definitely a causal link between violent media consumption and violent behavior. Violent media consumption is neither necessary nor sufficient for violent behavior, but it is causal. (This also does not imply that violent media causes large violent outbursts -- heightened availability of aggressive behavior could manifest as simply as being more easily frustrated or having a slightly quicker temper. But very small effects build up over time, sometimes into large amounts of lost value.) I suppose your rhetorical question could be read as a value statement, in that it's ethically subjective whether violent behaviors caused by violent media are "bad". But since you seem to care about drops in real-world violence, I'll assume that isn't the case.