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Moral Disengagement of Violent and Nonviolent Antisocial Behavior in Video Games

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Moral Disengagement of Violent and Nonviolent Antisocial Behavior in Video Games MORAL DISENGAGEMENT OF VIOLENT AND NONVIOLENT ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR IN VIDEO GAMES Michael H. Bailey A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS December 2020 Committee: Richard Anderson, Advisor Eric Dubow Laura Leventhal © 2020 Enter your Michael H. Bailey All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Richard B. Anderson, Advisor Studies on moral disengagement have helped to explain how people who play violent video games are able to overcome or even ignore the questionable moral choices they often make while playing. While video game research often looks at the differences between morally questionable violence and nonviolence in video games, the nonviolent condition is usually in the form of a game that has little to no moral choices required of the player. There is an absence of research that looked at how immoral or antisocial violence, often used in mainstream video games, compares to antisocial but nonviolent (such as theft, lying, cheating, or other non- physically harmful actions) behavior in its ability to elicit guilt and prompt moral disengagement. Prior researchers may have overestimated the effect that violence has on video game participants that could be partially explained by the antisocial nature of the choices made in the video game. Participants played through Fallout 3 behaving in either an antisocial or prosocial fashion, and either using as little or as much violence as possible. The results found that violence had no significant effect on guilt, and had little to no effect on other affective outcomes. However, main effects of sociality were observed, with guilt being higher in the antisocial condition and moral disengagement being higher in the prosocial condition. These findings suggest that the prosocial and antisocial nature of in-game behaviors are the driving force of moral disengagement and guilt within games, rather than violence. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my research advisor, Richard Anderson, for providing guidance and feedback throughout this project, as well as my committee members: Laura Leventhal and Eric Dubow. I would also like to thank the following people for their contributions in data collection: Sam Beery, Charis Hoard, Riley Hessel, Jacqueline Mader, and Michael Spiegel who were instrumental in getting the project done in a timely manner. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1 LITERATURE REVIEW ......................................................................................................... 4 Social Cognitive Theory ............................................................................................... 4 Moral Agency ............................................................................................................... 5 Moral Disengagement ................................................................................................... 7 Mechanisms ...................................................................................................... 7 Moral Justification ................................................................................ 7 Euphemistic Language .......................................................................... 8 Diffusion and Displacement of Responsibility ..................................... 8 Advantageous Comparison ................................................................... 8 Distortion of Consequences .................................................................. 9 Other Mechanisms ................................................................................ 10 Implications....................................................................................................... 11 Moral Disengagement in Video Games ........................................................................ 12 Empathy ............................................................................................................ 13 Guilt .................................................................................................................. 14 Violence in Video Games: Are Games to Blame? ........................................................ 14 Alternative Explanations ................................................................................... 16 Social Context of Video Games ........................................................................ 17 The Present Research .................................................................................................... 19 Prediction 1 ....................................................................................................... 20 vi Prediction 2 ....................................................................................................... 21 Prediction 3 ....................................................................................................... 21 Prediction 4 ....................................................................................................... 21 METHOD ................................................................................................................................. 23 Participants .................................................................................................................... 23 Design ........................................................................................................................... 23 Principle Dependent Variables ......................................................................... 23 Other Measures ................................................................................................. 24 Materials ....................................................................................................................... 24 Procedure ...................................................................................................................... 25 Coding ........................................................................................................................ 26 RESULTS ............................................................................................................................... 22 Manipulation Check ...................................................................................................... 28 Sociality ............................................................................................................ 28 Violence ............................................................................................................ 28 Tests of Predictions ....................................................................................................... 31 Other Results ............................................................................................................... 32 DISCUSSION ........................................................................................................................... 39 Violence ........................................................................................................................ 39 Sociality ........................................................................................................................ 40 Conclusions ................................................................................................................... 41 Limitations .................................................................................................................... 42 REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................... 45 vii APPENDIX A. MODIFIED DIFFERENTIAL EMOTIONS SCALE .................................... 55 APPENDIX B. MECHANISMS OF MORAL DISENGAGEMENT ..................................... 56 APPENDIX C. IMMERSION SCALE.................................................................................... 58 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1 Effect of Violence and Sociality on Guilt as a Function of Moral Disengagement ..... 35 ix LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1 Correlations of Self-rated Measure and Number of Dialog Choices ............................ 30 2 Correlations of Moral Disengagement, Self-rated Measures, and Affective Outcomes ...................................................................................................................... 34 3 Sample Sizes for Effect of Violence and Sociality on Guilt as a Function of Moral Disengagement ................................................................................................... 36 1 INTRODUCTION Over the past 25 years the level of detail and realism presented in video games has grown significantly. Where video games once used block-shaped images on the screen, today, games are becoming less and less distinguishable from reality. With these graphical changes have come changes in the degree to which people empathize with virtual characters and view them as social entities rather than simply geometric shapes (Morrison & Ziemke, 2005; Yee et al., 2007). Many experiments have been done examining the link between video games and certain social behaviors (Anderson & Bushman, 2001; Bushman & Anderson, 2015; Carnagey et al., 2007; Ferguson et al., 2008; Greitemeyer & Mügge, 2014). Despite being a virtual world, the actions players take can lead to emotional changes. Depending on the game and genre, those behaviors can lead
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