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alexgieg | 20 days ago

That's incorrect. There have been studies on this. In a few cases seeing depictions of violence causes an urge to act violently, but in the majority of people predisposed to violence it causes a reduction in that impulse, so on average there's a reduction.

The same has been shown to be the case with depictions of sexual abuse. For some it leads the person to go out and do it. For the majority of those predisposed to be sexual predators it "satisfies" them, and they end up causing less harm.

Presumably the same applies to pedophiles. I remember reading a study on this that suggested this to be the case, but the sample size was small so the statistical significance was weak.

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hansvm|20 days ago

This review [0] is a bit reductionist and overconfident with some of its adjacent claims, but it includes a decent overview of the studies we've done on the topic and references those for further reading. The effect is weak enough at a societal level that it mostly doesn't make sense to consider (and those effect directions are not supportive of your claim of overall reduction if you want to interpret them as strong enough to matter), but when restricted to groups pre-disposed to violence you do see a meaningful increase in violent behaviors.

[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/3/4/491