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the norms of communities, families, and individuals within it. The media
operate at this societal level, and media effects can be seen at all levels.
Thus, the media can affect us not only one-on-one, when we are
watching TV, for example, but they also affect us by affecting the

norms, expectations, and patterns of behavior of our families and
communities. This is another aspect of the media’s subtlety—they can
affect us through multiple directions at once. Although this makes it

likely that everyone will be affected by violent media in some way, it
also makes it likely that the effects may not be identical for all people.
Myth 5. Causality means “necessary and sufficient.”
Determining if and when something “causes” something else is a

problem that has plagued philosophers and scientists for centuries. In the
social sciences, it is a surprisingly complex problem to solve. For many
people, however, it has become oversimplified—something is a cause if

it can be shown to be necessary and/or sufficient as a precursor. This
position has been used to argue against the effects of media violence.
Ferguson (2002), in a response to Bushman and Anderson’s (2001)

meta-analyses of media violence and aggression, stated that: (a) because
humans have always been violent, “violent media, then, are not a
necessary precursor to violent behavior” (p. 446), and (b) because many

people who are exposed to media violence never commit violent
behavior, “violent media, then, are not sufficient to cause violent
behavior” (p. 446). This argument seems, on its surface, to be
reasonable. Yet this argument actually betrays a grossly oversimplified

idea of causation. Consider, for example, a rock on the side of a hill.
Assume that you give the rock a push and it begins rolling down the hill.
Did you cause the rock to roll down the hill?

By the argument laid out above, you did not. Rocks have rolled
down hills for centuries without someone coming along and pushing
them. Therefore pushing it is not necessary. Furthermore, many rocks
that are pushed do not roll down hills. Therefore, pushing it is not

sufficient. Although pushing the rock was neither necessary nor
sufficient to make it roll down the hill, that does not mean that it was not
a cause of the rock’s beginning to roll. Most complex issues of interest

(such as aggressive behavior) are multicausal. In the present example,
many other issues interact to determine whether the push you gave to the
rock caused it to roll down the hill: the force of gravity, the mass of the

rock, the shape of the rock (round rocks require less of a push than
square ones), the friction of the hill surface, the slope of the hill surface,