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the direction of the push, the force of the push, how deeply the rock is
embedded into the ground, and so on — all interact to determine
whether your push makes the rock begin to roll or not. Recognition that
the issue is multicausal does not mean that your push is not one of the

causes; in fact, it may have been a significant determiner or catalyst for
the ultimate outcome, without which the other causes would not have
been activated or sufficient. Aggressive behavior, too, is multicausal.

Media violence is likely to be one of the pushes that interacts with other
forces at work. In most situations, it is neither necessary nor sufficient.
However, that does not mean that it is not a cause — it just means that it
is one of the causes.

This conception of causality is similar to the idea of “proximate
cause” in law, where the goal is to assign legal responsibility for an
action. The proximate cause is the last action to set off a sequence of

events that produces an injury. Yet, the goal of social science is not the
same as that of law. Social science is concerned with all of the causes
for some behavior, not only the necessary, sufficient, most recent, or

largest causes. Because media violence has been shown to increase the
likelihood of aggressive behavior, it can be a cause of aggressive
behavior, even if it alone is not a necessary or sufficient cause.

Myth 6. Causality means immediacy.
Many people also expect that causality requires immediacy, as in a
fall causing a broken bone. As noted in the smoking and cancer
example, however, physical symptoms may become visible only after

some threshold of disease process is attained, which may take a long
time. With regard to media violence, many people assume that the
effects must be seen in the short term in order to be caused by exposure.

For example, Ferguson (2002, p. 447) states, “If media violence is a
necessary and direct cause of violent behavior, a significant decline in
violent crime should not be occurring unless violence in the media is
also declining.” We have already seen that media violence can be a

cause without being a “necessary” cause. The issue of whether it is a
“direct” cause seems to be the relationship between the amount of media
violence and the incidence of violence in society. From the 1950s until

about 1993, both the amount of media violence and the number of
aggravated assaults rose in the United States (Grossman, 1996). In the
latter half of the 1990s, the aggravated-assault rate fell somewhat while

the amount of media violence stayed constant or increased (especially in