The effect of prosocial video games on real-life behaviour. Evgeny Vasilets
Student ID: 11752920
Supervisor and External Assessor: Dr. Michal Klincewicz Internal Assessor: Dr. Dr Gijs van Houwelingen
Abstract
There is a substantial body of research related to the effect of prosocial video games on behaviour and underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. Two theoretical frameworks are usually discussed: General Learning Model (GLM), which predicts a positive effect on prosocial behaviour, and moral licensing effect, which, oppositely, predicts a negative influence on such behaviour in real life. The current paper investigates evidence for both theories and their underlying mechanisms and conditions for the emergence of the described effects on prosocial behaviour. This literature review concludes that both theories are supported by evidence, and they can coexist without contradicting each other as they describe different cognitive mechanisms that can be activated by specific persons’ and games’ properties.
Video games have been becoming more popular in the last decades (Schrier & Gibson, 2011). This rise attracted the attention of many scholars who investigated how video games can affect individuals and societies (e.g. Ferguson, 2015; Hartmann et al., 2010; Hull et al., 2014; Teng et al., 2018). One popular topic is the effect of video games on morality. A great number of articles investigated how videogames with antisocial content could affect the personality and behaviour of players (Greitemeyer & Mügge, 2014); however, a much less substantial body of research was conducted to investigate another side of the video game industry - an effect of the video games with prosocial content. The current paper aims to investigate how prosocial video games affect real-life behaviour, and what are the underlying cognitive mechanisms of this effect. Besides, the paper seeks to find what are the conditions for different types of effects of video games on behaviour.
How does the prosocial behaviour in video-games affects the real-life behaviour? General Learning Model
There is a substantial body of research addressing the relationship between behaviour in video-games and real-life situations. One perspective on this issue is through the lens of the General Learning Model (GLM) (Buckley & Anderson, 2006). It was hypothesised that people who play games where it is needed to exercise prosocial behaviour would manifest such
behaviour in real life more frequently. This model predicts both short and long-term changes in behaviour due to prosocial video games. This suggestion is in line with the moral consistency paradigm, that states that people who behave prosocially in one situation are more likely to show similar behaviour in other cases (Conway & Peetz, 2012). The GLM explains short-term changes through priming and conditioning effects, meaning that prosocial video games foster scripts of prosocial behaviour and reward for their application (Gentile et al., 2009).
Several experiments were conducted to test the application of GLM to videogames. One of the first studies by Chambers & Ascione (1987) compared how participating in aggressive and prosocially oriented games affected the donating behaviour. The results showed that children in an aggressive condition donated significantly less than the control group. However, there was no significant difference between the control and prosocial group. This result supports the idea that the videogames are more efficient in cultivating antisocial rather than prosocial behaviour. However, the lack of effect in prosocial condition could also be explained by the experiment’s limitations. Although the playing times were equal, the absolute amount of time when people were involved in prosocial behaviour was lower than the time of involvement in aggressive behaviour in the antisocial condition. Besides, the types of prosocial behaviour in the game (rescuing) and in real life (donating) were different types of behaviour, which could also lead to the inconsistency in results.
A more recent study of Greitemeyer & Osswald (2010) attempted to account for the previous research limitations and conducted four experiments. In contrast to the previous research, the type of prosocial behaviour in games and real-life was selected to be of similar types. Investigations revealed that prosocial behaviour was increased for both low-cost and high-cost actions. Moreover, several confound variables were controlled, such as observer-expectancy and likability effects. Also, it was revealed that the accessibility to prosocial thoughts, one of the mediators proposed by GLM, was positively influenced by prosocial video games.
Another study also investigated how prosocial behaviour in video games affected donating (Iten et al., 2018). However, in this study, participants chose whether to manifest prosocial behaviour: helping a non-player character in exchange for game resources. Another feature of this study is that the game also required participants to exercise aggressive behaviour
by shooting at other Non-Player Characters (NPC). Thus, the results of the experiment would show how the mixture of prosocial and antisocial behaviour influences real-life prosocial behaviour. It was found that voluntary decision to help an NPC was associated with a higher donating sum afterwards. The authors pointed out that allowing participants to choose their behaviour voluntarily improved the experiment’s validity, as that is more resembling a real gaming process. However, because of this, it is impossible to exclude the possibility that more prosocially oriented participants chose to help in the game. Hence, they could donate more due to their personality trait and not because of the game content. Nevertheless, a bunch of other studies, where participants did not have a choice but to exercise prosocial behaviour supported the positive effect of prosocial behaviour (Breuer et al., 2017; Ellithorpe et al., 2015;
Greitemeyer & Osswald, 2010; Happ et al., 2013; Velez, 2015).
So far, we discussed the effect of prosocial behaviour on short-term behaviour, but what about the longitudinal effects? By the longitudinal effects, we imply a reaction that lasts a longer time (days or weeks) after the immediate exposure. In order to elicit longitudinal effects,
repetitive exposure to stimuli might be needed. According to the GLM, long-term changes in behaviour are also possible because of video games (Buckley & Anderson, 2006). It was claimed that experiencing specific behaviour in video-games leads to learning the applied behavioural patterns. As a result, these learnt patterns can be retrieved and applied to a real-life situation later. Naturally, fewer studies regarding the long-term effects of prosocial game playing on behaviour were conducted due to the greater methodological difficulty of such studies. Thus, most research about this relationship has a correlational design, which does not allow to make conclusions about causality. For example, a positive relationship between time spent on video-games and cooperation extent in prisoner dilemma tasks was found (Mengel, 2014).
Nevertheless, there were some attempts to investigate the longitude causal relationship. For instance, Gentile et al. (2009) measured the time that participants spent playing games with prosocial content and how often they exercised certain types of prosocial behaviour in the past month. The measurement was conducted two times with a three to four months time span between the evaluations. The study concluded that the relationship between prosocial behaviour in games and real life is bi-directional, meaning that they affect each other.
Finally, the main thesis of GLM, which is that the content of the game has a determinant
influence on the type of behaviour that the game promotes is supported by recent meta-analyses. In the review, Greitemeyer & Mügge (2014) considered 15 and 12 studies investigating the effect of games with aggressive and prosocial content respectively on prosocial behaviour. They found that the type of content is consistent with the polarity of the effect.
Moral Licensing framework
There is an alternative view on the effect of videogames on behaviour, which predicts that prosocial choices in games may have adverse effects on prosocial behaviour in real life, which is opposite of what GLM postulates. The moral licence framework suggests that prior moral or immoral decisions may promote opposite subsequent behaviour. The idea behind this claim is that people may indulge themselves in behaving in an antisocial way because they feel that they had the moral high ground after exercising moral behaviour (Merritt et al., 2010). Ellithorpe et al. (2015) investigated this hypothesis in their study. In the first task, they asked participants to play a game, where they were allowed to choose whether to play in a
conventionally moral or immoral way. In the second task, participants played a noise blast game, where, as participants were informed, they could avenge another player in two different ways. Firstly, they could increase the loudness of noise that the participant's opponent experienced in
the case of loss. Secondly, they could decrease the reward of their opponent. Afterwards,
participants were suggested to donate a sum of their choice. The results showed that participants who behaved in a conventionally less moral way in the first game were also less likely to
retaliate against their opponent in the second task. Moreover, the higher retaliation level was associated with higher donations. Thus, it is unclear whether the immoral decision in the first task or higher level of retaliation affected the donation behaviour, but in either way, the results are consistent with the moral licensing view.
As can be seen from the body of research above, GLM and moral licensing frameworks predicted opposite effects of games, where participants behaved prosocially, on real-life
behaviour, and both frameworks received experimental support. One hypothesis explaining this inconsistency is that the voluntariness of the choice condition may play a crucial role in the activation of moral licensing effect (Clot et al., 2016). However, this claim was not supported by the study of Iten et al. (2018). Instead, another explanation was suggested for this inconsistency, which is the extent of association with the game character. According to them, a higher
association with the character leads to greater consistency among behaviour. This notion is consistent with the study of Clot et al. (2016), that found that only participants with non-intrinsic motivation to do virtuous deeds were influenced by the licensing effect. It is important to note that the effect of moral licensing is considered to be short-term, affecting a behaviour that is manifested immediately after the decision (Iten et al., 2018).
To sum up, video games with prosocial content may influence our behaviour via various mechanisms, and depending on the additional factors related to both games and players, the effect can take different directions. There is some evidence that short-term effects on real-life behaviour can be negative. This effect is believed to be stronger if players are forced to play in a
moral way against their will. However, this hypothesis did not receive overwhelming support, so it is unclear what exactly activates the moral licensing effect.
However, most research supports GLM, which predicts the positive effect of such games on prosocial behaviour. This relationship can be empowered if the real-life behaviour and the behaviour in games are of the same type. In addition, a game has a positive effect even if it has aggressive content together with a prosocial one. Moreover, aggressive behaviour in games was found to promote prosocial behaviour if the character was considered to have the moral high ground.
Affective and cognitive mechanisms
We have mainly discussed behavioural evidence of two opposing theories, explaining the effect of prosocial video games on real-life behaviour. However, we also aim to establish the underlying mechanisms that are responsible for the behavioural changes. The field of cognitive psychology provides some evidence that supports the GLM in application to video games. The study of Greitemeyer & Osswald (2009) found that playing prosocial video games decreased the hostile expectation bias, meaning that participants expected less aggressive behaviour from other people. The accessibility to antisocial thoughts was also decreased after playing a prosocial video game, which was measured by the word completion task, where people can fill a gap in a word and obtain a neutral or aggressive word. Generally, this study indicated that prosocial video games inhibit aggressive cognitions, at least in the short-term.
Another effect elicited by video games with prosocial content was found by Greitemeyer & Osswald (2010). They revealed that playing prosocial video increased people’s ability to feel empathy. Those who played a prosocial video game felt less malevolence and more happiness for character in comparison to the group that played a neutral video game. At the same time, it
was found that the accessibility to prosocial thoughts is higher after playing a prosocial video game. Another study found that prosocial video games may influence the attentional biases towards prosocial stimuli (Qiu et al., 2020), which also results in the increased accessibility to prosocial thoughts and behavioural schemas. These findings are in line with the GLM, which states that changes in one’s cognitive processes can affect further decision making (Buckley & Anderson, 2006).
Neuroscientific research also shed light on cognitive processes affected by the prosocial content of video games. One study applied the EEG technique to investigate the reaction of the brain on prosocial and aggressive words after exposure to prosocial and neutral video games (Liu et al., 2015). The results showed that a response to aggressive words, which was measured by P300 event-related potential amplitude, was decreased in the group which played a prosocial video-game. This outcome can be interpreted in such a way that short-term exposure to a
prosocial video game may inhibit aggressive reactions. These results support the GLM model, as it states that the inhibition of aggressive cognition is one of the components of learning new prosocial behaviour patterns (Buckley & Anderson, 2006). Another ERP study identified no P300 but found weak evidence that there was a reduced N2 response in the frontal area (Teng et al., 2018). This area is known to be responsible for moral decisions and empathy, among other processes (Balconi & Canavesio, 2013; Lahat et al., 2013). Specifically, larger N2 amplitudes are associated with high internal conflict. In the study of Teng et al. (2018), this pattern was found only in the group which played prosocial video games and then observed a situation, where others needed help, but the aid was not provided. Thus, it can be concluded that sensitivity to immorality was higher among participants who recently played prosocial video games.
Unfortunately, less information is available regarding the internal mechanism responsible for the moral licensing effect in video games. One condition for its activation was suggested to be the direct touch effect (Sass & Weimann, 2015). This effect implies that a person observes the direct prosocial consequence of their actions, and in this condition, the moral licensing effect is more likely. Moreover, the moral licensing effect seems to manifest if the good deed and
subsequent behaviour are related to a similar social norm. In the experiment, it was shown that a moral licensing effect could be found after a week. Importantly, in this experiment, people thought that they were playing with real people. Thus, these results do not tell us whether this effect would be preserved after playing a game with prosocial content. In order to answer this question, we need to understand whether behaving prosocially towards a character in a game resembles similar interaction with a real person.
Naturally, we can suggest that this effect should be active at least in cooperative multiplayer games, where people interact with other players in prosocial ways. For example, it was found that people built robust social connections with their co-players within MMORPG games, which implies a high level of interaction between people and perception of other players as human beings rather than avatars (Cole & Griffiths, 2007). Thus, it can be said that behaving prosocially towards other players should be perceived similarly as behaving prosocially towards people in real life. Another study found that reasons for prosocial behaviour in video games include altruism and reciprocity, which is another similarity between this type of behaviour in real life and in games and contradicts the idea that people behave prosocially in games in order to obtain in-game rewards (Wang & Wang, 2008). All this research suggests that helping in online games should elicit feelings resembling those ones when people behave prosocially in real
life. Nevertheless, there is a lack of research investigating this question directly, so it is preliminary to conclude it.
It is essential to mention that most studies investigated short-term reactions and changes of video games on moral behaviour. There is also some evidence that repetitive exposure to video games leads to the decrease of the effect (Montag et al., 2012). However, this evidence was obtained for the impact of antisocial video games and their impact on brain activity. Further research is needed to investigate whether this effect is similar for reactions on prosocial stimuli.
Magic Circle
The term Magic Circle refers to the idea that there is an imaginary boundary between the world of video games and real-life because video games have artificial context and a set of rules that are different from the rules in the real world (Linser et al., 2008). This concept is crucial for our research, as it implies that actions in video games can be perceived as actions in an isolated environment that cannot be transferred to the real world. The aim of this chapter is to investigate what are the arguments for and against the magic circle in the application of video games to prosocial behaviour, and what are the conditions for the genesis of it. In other words, we will investigate what are the aspects of video games and people’s motivations that could affect such perception. Ultimately, this chapter aims to identify the factors that are crucial to consider when studying moral decision making in video games and apply this knowledge to real-life
behaviour.
There are several papers investigating how people make moral decisions in video games. One study conducted a qualitative analysis to learn what people felt making immoral decisions in video games (Consalvo et al., 2019). Although gamers reported that a video game is a safe zone to experiment with moral choices, they reported feeling discomfort when choosing evil
pathways. Thus, we cannot claim that decisions in video games are fully out of touch with reality. A focus-group also showed that at about half of the players were motivated by moral justifications rather than in-game profit when making moral decisions in games (Krcmar & Cingel, 2016).
Nevertheless, other findings show that videogames still provide a context that allows players to behave in a different way from what they tend to do in real life. For example, people reported that games provide a unique “what if” opportunity, meaning that people may want to make a decision that they would not be able to make in real life to experience new emotions (Consalvo et al., 2019). The question is what are the factors that define whether a person would consider moral dilemmas in a similar way in a game as in real life are. These factors can be divided into two major groups: player’s and game’s characteristics.
Individual’s motivation to play the game significantly affects the decision-making
process. Different motivations include escapism, exploration and eudaimonic experience (Holl et al., 2020). Escapism means that players engage in video games, particularly in order to
experience certain actions or emotions that are not available for them in real life. Thus, by definition, their in-game behaviour will deviate from real life. Exploration refers to the desire of a player to find all possible gameplay options. Therefore, all moral choice branches will be selected at some point, although the first choice is frequently the most morally plausible one. Lastly, eudaimonic experience refers to the motivation to get a meaningful experience, which is the opposite to the motivation of “just having fun”. Players with such motivation usually consider moral choice seriously. Thus, in order to improve the ecological validity of researching moral choices using video games, it is important to minimise the number of players
with the motivations related to escapism and exploration and engage them in the eudaimonic experience.
Another player’s characteristic that is believed to play a role in moral decisions in video games is the moral salience of a particular module. The idea of moral modules emerges from the Moral Foundation Theory (MFT) (Haidt & Joseph, 2004). According to this theory, people make moral decisions intuitively rather than rationally. Moral decisions are dependent on the salience of a particular moral module for an individual. Five moral modules were proposed: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, authority/respect, ingroup/loyalty, and purity/sanctity. One study found that the morality of a choice in a video game depends on the moral salience of the moral module for a player if the moral decision is related to the given module (Joeckel et al., 2012). In other words, if, for instance, purity was an important moral concept for an individual, they were more prone to make a decision that was considered to be moral from the perspective of this moral module. This study showed that people treat in-game decisions similarly to the decisions in real life, which contradicts the concept of the magic circle.
Game characteristics is another group of factors that affects the moral decision process. One such factor is the nature of the game avatar - the character who makes the in-game decisions (Consalvo et al., 2019). It was revealed that the avatar could be perceived as an empty vessel which can be assigned any moral role. However, the avatar can also influence players’ decisions as a player may want to align moral decisions with the avatar’s personality, especially if the avatar has vivid traits. For instance, it was found that the gender of the avatar can influence moral choices (Schrier, 2012). Therefore, in order to make the player’s moral decisions as close to reality as possible, the sex of the game character should either be unknown or similar to the player’s sex.
Another factor which played an important role in making people behave in video games similarly to how they behaved in real life was found to be the high interactivity level (Holl et al., 2020). The term ‘interactivity’ refers to the number of available options. Players claimed that some immoral actions would be tolerated if they were mandatory in the game, as it would lead to moral disengagement. For example, some players switched from “me” to “my character” when they referred to the actions that were mandatory in a game (Holl et al., 2020). Thus, it is important to predefine all possible moral choices in order to engage a player in the moral decision process.
The research of Katsarov et al. (2019) evaluated 20 different mechanics in terms of their effect on training moral sensitivity of players. Moral sensitivity refers to people’s ability to recognise moral issues and appreciate their importance when making a decision. In this research, the mechanics that help to improve this competence were discussed. These mechanics are
interesting for our research as they aim to maximise the engagement of a player in moral
decision making in order to increase awareness of such problems. Thus, these mechanics should also make people think about in-game moral issues the same way they would think about them in real life. These mechanics include taking different perspectives to see how moral choices can affect different sides, engagement in the conflict resolution process and seeing consequences of one’s actions. Inclusion of such mechanics in a video game will likely increase the engagement of a player, and as a result, participants' actions will be closer to what they would do in real life.
Interestingly, the factors necessary for the engagement are similar to the factors that were suggested to play a role in the moral licensing effect. Both the level of association with the game character and the greater extent of freedom when making the moral decision were supported to play a role in the emergence of the moral licensing effect (Clot et al., 2016; Iten et al., 2018).
Similarly, these factors were closely related to the breaking of the magic circle, so people would make similar decisions in games and in real life (Consalvo et al., 2019; Holl et al., 2020). This leads to the suggestion that the distinction in the activation of moral licensing effect and GLM can be mediated by the magic circle emergence. Nevertheless, further research is needed to support this hypothesis.
Conclusions
The existing literature considers two possible theories that predict two conflicting effects, either positive or negative influence of prosocial video games on similar behaviour in real life. The amount of research about these two theories is disproportional with a strong bias towards the GLM topic. This might be one of the reasons why the GLM acquired more evidence than the licensing effect.
It is crucial to note that although these theories predict conflicting effects, it does not mean that one theory is correct and the other one is false. As can be derived from the literature above, these theories describe different processes that can occur in parallel. The GLM describes the learning process, which occurs in a wide set of situations, for instance, even when prosocial behaviour is mixed with antisocial or when antisocial actions are conducted by morally positive characters (Happ et al., 2013; Iten et al., 2018). Meanwhile, the moral licensing effect is more demanding and emerges only in certain conditions (Clot et al., 2016; Iten et al., 2018). Moreover, GLM suggested a long-lasting effect of video games on behaviour, while the licensing effect is likely to diminish with each new iteration (Mengel, 2014; Montag et al., 2012). The parallelism of these two processes can be assumed and might resemble one of many dual-process models, where two systems compete to push the player’s moral behaviour towards their side (e.g. Krcmar & Eden, 2017). The winner among these two models, as was shown, may depend on players’
motivation, moral values as well as on games’ properties, such as mechanics, the extent of freedom and the avatar.
Future research should focus on the licencing effect and reasons why it can emerge and lead to the opposite results predicted by GLM. The existing literature suggests that the magic circle may play a role in this effect: similar factors were involved in both the moral licensing effect and breaking a magic circle. This interaction seems reasonable because the moral licensing effect requires the person to think that they have done a good deed. It is natural to suggest that in order to elicit such thoughts with video games, this person should perceive the world of a video game as realistic as possible, which implies the breaking of the magic circle.
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