The conventional wisdom about violent video games is that playing them
can desensitize you to the violence in question, leaving you less able
to care about those immoral acts in the future. New research indicates
that the exact opposite may be true.
A study led by Matthew Grizzard, assistant professor in the
department of communication at the University at Buffalo, reaffirmed
previous research saying that committing immoral acts in games can cause
players to feel guilt. Moreover, the study found that players would
become more sensitive to the specific moral codes that they violated
while playing — and according to Grizzard and his co-authors, that may
eventually lead players to practice prosocial behavior (that is, voluntary behavior for the benefit of other people).
"Contrary to popular belief, engaging in heinous behaviors in virtual
environments can lead to an increased sensitivity to moral issues,"
Grizzard wrote. "Results of the current study suggest a link between the
performance of antisocial behaviors in video games and the potential
for prosocial effects."
The study, "Being Bad in a Video Game Can Make Us More Morally Sensitive," was published June 20 online in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking.
Grizzard's team, which also included researchers from Michigan State
University and the University of Texas at Austin, studied 185
individuals aged 18-29 at a "large Midwestern university," according to a
copy of the paper that Grizzard provided to Polygon.
The participants played a modified version of Bohemia Interactive's 2001 shooter
Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis
(screenshot above) because that was the title used in a previous study
and it "was known to elicit guilt," said Grizzard in an interview with
Polygon. (Bohemia re-released the game in 2011 as
Arma: Cold War Assault).
First, the researchers randomly assigned the participants to play a
game or perform a memory recall task. They randomly assigned the gaming
segment to play
Cold War Crisis in two ways: Either they would
play as terrorists (the "guilt condition"), or as U.N. peacekeepers in
the "control condition." The researchers also split the memory recall
participants into two groups: They asked the guilt condition people to
write about a time in which they felt particularly guilty, while they
requested the control condition folks to write about a normal day.
Grizzard and his cohorts found that the participants who played
Cold War Crisis
in the guilt condition felt guilty about the particular areas of
morality they had violated ("care/harm" and "fairness/reciprocity,"
since killing would be unjustified when playing as a terrorist). While
the guilt that the players experienced was less intense than the
real-life guilt that the memory recall group wrote about, the study's
authors said the data indicated that "the guilt experienced from game
play is functionally similar to real-world guilt."
"The findings here demonstrate the potential for emotional
experiences that result from media exposure to alter the intuitive
foundations upon which humans make moral judgments," Grizzard wrote in
the study. He added that this is "particularly important" for video
games, since a "small but considerably important" segment of the gaming
population plays violent games frequently.
Asked to expand on that point — whether repeated instances of playing
violent games could deepen or diminish these morality effects —
Grizzard said that he conducted additional research to study that very
question. That second study hasn't been published yet, but Grizzard
discussed some of the findings.
"The results of [the second] study showed that the ability of games
to elicit guilt was reduced over repeated play. Currently, however, it
is unclear how this reduction in the ability of guilt would relate to
the other processes at play in the current study," he explained.
Research has shown that guilt and increased moral sensitivity in real
life often lead to prosocial behavior. Thus, the study's authors
concluded, there's some likelihood that the same could be true for guilt
resulting from immoral virtual behavior. In other words, playing
violent games can make you feel guilty, which may cause you to do nice
things for other people.
