Be careful with correlation

I’ve written in the past about studies which suggest that the rise in video game play causes all sorts of terrible things: rise in levels of aggression, decline in attendance at national parks, and so on.

Of course, very few of these studies show a causal link between game play and whatever the particular calamity may be. They only show that in the same period of time that game play has gone up, so has some social ill.

Now here’s a new twist (subscription required) on an old theme: A recent report form the National Endowment for the Arts shows that the number of adults who have read a novel, story, poem, or play in the last year is now over 50%–up from 47% in 2002.

So in six years, while online game play has skyrocketed, the number of adults who read for pleasure has gone up as well.

Now I am not naive enough to think that one has caused the other–although it would not be completely crazy to think that people who play online might come to like reading more. But more to the point, for all of those who prophesy the doom of civilization as we know it because people play video games, remember: he who lives by the correlation, dies by the correlation.