Violent and nonviolent video games produce opposing effects on aggressive and prosocial outcomes

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Abstract

Experimental studies routinely show that participants who play a violent game are more aggressive immediately following game play than participants who play a nonviolent game. The underlying assumption is that nonviolent games have no effect on aggression, whereas violent games increase it. The current studies demonstrate that, although violent game exposure increases aggression, nonviolent video game exposure decreases aggressive thoughts and feelings (Exp 1) and aggressive behavior (Exp 2). When participants assessed after a delay were compared to those measured immediately following game play, violent game players showed decreased aggressive thoughts, feelings and behavior, whereas nonviolent game players showed increases in these outcomes. Experiment 3 extended these findings by showing that exposure to nonviolent puzzle-solving games with no expressly prosocial content increases prosocial thoughts, relative to both violent game exposure and, on some measures, a no-game control condition. Implications of these findings for models of media effects are discussed.

Section snippets

Participants

One hundred eighty-eight undergraduates (131 women) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recruited using a Psychology Department website, participated in exchange for course credit.

Video games

Two violent games (Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition) and two nonviolent games (Zuma and The Next Tetris) were used in this study. Both violent games were first-person shooter games, where players run through a futuristic gladiator arena and must kill multiple enemies with a

Participants

Three hundred eighty-nine undergraduate men at the University of North Carolina participated in the study for credit toward a course requirement. Participants were recruited through a university website.

Materials

All video games and questionnaires were identical to those used in Experiment 1.

Delay task

To test the generality of the time delay effect, a different delay task was used in Experiment 2. Participants in the time-delay conditions completed a picture rating task for 15 min. In this task, participants viewed

Participants

One hundred and eleven undergraduate students (68 female) at the University of North Carolina and Gettysburg College participated in the study for credit toward a course requirement. Participants were recruited through websites at each University.

Materials

Games and initial questionnaires were identical to those utilized in Studies 1 and 2.

Dependent measures

Order of administration of the two dependent measures was counterbalanced within each condition.

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