Young People Who Play Video Games Have Higher Moral Reasoning Skills (inews.co.uk)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Young people who play video games, including violent titles, display more developed moral reasoning skills than their non-gaming peers, a study has found. Researchers from Bournemouth University asked 166 adolescents aged between 11 and 18-years old about their video game habits and questions designed to measure their moral development -- the thought process behind determining what is right or wrong. The children and teenagers who said they played more video games from a wide variety of genres had increased moral reasoning scores, including titles containing violent content. Violent games were found to have a positive relationship with moral reasoning while mature content was more likely to produce a negative one, the report published in published in journal Frontiers in Psychology found.

Comments

Finish them off?

[sycodon]

I just ran this guy down in my 1969 Mustang. Should I steal his stuff and finish him off, or give him a Med Pack and send him on his way.

Re:Finish them off?

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody showed me Grand Theft Auto when it came out. Moral reasoning skills?

You can have sex with a prostitute. Then if you kill her, you don't have to pay!

Wowzers. I grew up on Pac-Man and Asteroids. Different world.

Re:Finish them off?

[Shaitan]

"You can have sex with a prostitute. Then if you kill her, you don't have to pay!"

Of course you don't have to pay if you kill her. Unless she has a pimp then you might need to kill him too but realistically I think he'd write it off. I mean clearly you are crazy, that bitch is dead anyway so she isn't going to be spreading word and hurting your rep, and it happens so rarely you just write it off as shrinkage.

The moral of the story? Prostitution should be legal so that sex workers enjoy the same legal protections as everyone else. The boys in blue are a giant heavily armed gang and you generally don't want them gunning for you.

Re:Finish them off?

[ShanghaiBill]

I grew up on Pac-Man and Asteroids. Different world.

Sure, because cannibalism is so much more moral than shooting someone. Whatever.

Re:Finish them off?

[lgw]

The boys in blue are a giant heavily armed gang and you generally don't want them gunning for you.

Nah, you just drive through a car wash and it's fine.

Re:Finish them off?

[jellomizer]

For most healthy humans, they know how to draw the line between imagination and reality. In a video game there is no lasting life consequence for your action, if you die, then you start the game over again or just respawn. In real life we don't see Gen Xers jumping off buildings because of all the platform games they played. Because we know it isn't real, and much of the violence in video games, is often played to see what will happen, because there are no consequences, and there is always a reset switch ready for any major mistake. I can play a game where I wipe out woodland creatures, however in real life I feel bad for having to setup a kill trap for that mouse which is chewing threw the back seat in my car (After numerous human traps have failed), heck I would normally just take a spider and put it outside vs just killing it.

Now if Grand Theft Auto was setup where you had to learn the life story of every person you have ran over, spend the rest of the game with a non-save, non-restart and non-quit state. Learning about the harm you have done, spending years of game time in jail. For those who played the game would be playing it like in real life.

Video games give us an outlet for a what if, nothing mattered, we are able to take risks in games that we wouldn't in real life. Heck just running down a mountain in Fallout isn't something I would do in real life, because a simulated fall where you loose 100HP vs a real fall where you may survive, but you will be hurting for much longer.

Re:Finish them off?

[hey!]

Let me make an important distinction here: there is a difference between moral reasoning ability and moral behavior. Personally I think that moral behavior is much, much harder to manipulate than moral opinions.

Why might a game like GTA improve moral reasoning ability? Well, let's look at one of the most important theoretical ideas in modern philosophical ethics, Kant's Categorical Imperative. The most widely known formulation of that is as follows:

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Without going into the reasoning behind this, Kant argued that the following, lesser known formulation is logically equivalent:

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

This is probably more useful to anyone who is creating some kind of test of moral reasoning ability. You evaluate someone's ability to understand how actions either treat people as things to be used vs. persons having intrinsic importance. So it's not inconceivable that GTA would help someone score higher on a score of moral reasoning. In the game you use everyone else as a means to an end (e.g., as an object of gratification or a tool in a more elaborate strategy) all the while conscious that these are not real people and that you are doing something which in real life would be morally reprehensible.

What is less clear is whether playing the game would have any effect on actual ethical behavior. But you could say the same thing for attempts to shape young peoples' moral character by, say, sending them to Sunday school. Sunday school imparts scriptural knowledge of virtues like temperance, charity and prudence, but it doesn't appear to affect attendees future behavior as much as it affects their opinions about other peoples' behavior. Likewise I wouldn't be surprised to see GTA affect players' reasoning abilities or even opinions (although not necessarily in a predictable way), but I'd be astonished if there were any kind of uniform and widespread effect on behavior.

Which is not to say there aren't outliers in either case; there's bound to be. However those outliers are set apart by their character independent of the thing in question.

Re:Finish them off?

[AmiMoJo]

People don't have a simple "monkey see monkey do" relationship with media, but that doesn't mean it has no influence at all.

In fact the best games, the best books and TV, are often the ones that do affect the player/viewer. Star Trek is a great example, although it wasn't exactly subtle in how it went about it.

Curious result

[alvinrod]

So violent video games lead to higher moral reasoning skills, but mature (by this they mean 'M' rated games) games don't. However, you look at their own study data (full study here) in particular Table B1, they show that there's a nearly perfect correlation (.98) between violent and mature. I don't think I've ever seen a correlation that high in any study, but it's besides the point. Since they're that strongly correlated how do they get the result as stated in the summary?

Maybe I just need to read the whole study instead of skimming through it, but the results seem strange to me. I think that this is obviously a study that would benefit from multiple repetitions and with a larger sample size.

Re:Curious result

[alvinrod]

There's a difference between mature in the sense that you're using it and what it means in the context of the study. From my reading, that means any 'M' rated game which doesn't necessarily deal with mature adult situations. Typically it just means that there's sufficiently graphic violence and/or profanity. The problem, I think, is that almost any game that gets an 'M' rating is going to have what's described as either violence or intense violence as a content descriptor.

As a quick test, I did a search on the ESRB website for 'M' rated PS4 games. The results only display 25 titles per page (and I have no idea if it consistently returns the same 25) but of those 25 games on the first page of results, only 1 was 'M' rated without containing Violence or Intense Violence as a content descriptor. That game was Nekopara Vol. 1 which is listed as only containing Sexual Themes. If I look at games which are rated 'T' (teen rating) I still find plenty of titles with Violence as a content descriptor, but a large number only list either Fantasy Violence or Mild Fantasy Violence.

I haven't read through the entire study, but I have a feeling that it would be pretty easy to have a flawed methodology on top of potentially confusing anyone who's reading the results and not aware of what "mature" constitutes for the purposes of this study.

Have they controlled for variables?

[Visarga]

Comparing the two populations (gamers vs non-gamers) is only valid if they are similarly distributed with respect to other control variables that might influence moral reasoning. What if age, affluence, level of technological adoption and place of birth have an impact on morality, and are correlated with gaming as well?

Re:Have they controlled for variables?

[alvinrod]

They performed regression analysis in the study, but strangely did not include the factor which correlated with socioeconomic status (in this study, whether the participant was entitled to free school meals) as a part of the regression. I'm not sure that they have a large enough sample or are controlling for enough other factors to sufficiently eliminate other causes as an explanation for their result. They didn't look specifically at a lot of other genres of games, and there are some genres or specific games that I think most would assume would have an effect on moral reasoning, at least compared to other games.

Testing Flawed

[zferrini]

He only surveyed 166 people? Really and you come to a conclusion with that few people, come on!

Do they define mature content ? (do not mod)

[aepervius]

I am trying to read https://www.frontiersin.org/ar... but for some reason I am not getting anything but a blank page. Do they define mature content as opposed to violent content ?

Correlation != causation

[sinij]

Correlation does not mean causation. It could be the case that more intelligent kids, that also have higher capacity for moral reasoning, are attracted to video games.

Re:Correlation != causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Or it could just be that richer kids, who have more time and resources to play video games, also have more involved and attentive parents.

Confounding variables FTW.

Re:Games prime you to think about it

[lgw]

I've read some theories that people who can't save money are people who can't picture the future where they will need that money, I wonder if other moral issues are similar where people just can't think out and picture the consequences of their actions. By playing through moral scenarios of any kind, people are kind of forced to think about the situation and can see it somewhat in real life.

I think there's something to that, but I think you missed something more basic here. In order to enjoy video games (or movies) you require a certain minimum level of ability to think abstractly. Some percentage of the population simply can't. People who play video games are going to be able to reason about anything slightly better than the general public, statistically, but it's just correlation without causation.

Games that require any sort of problem solving (as opposed to just action in the moment) will raise the bar some more, and you'd get a larger statistical correlation with ability to reason about anything.

Re:Then why do I hear these stories

[Mashiki]

of the "domestic disturbances" broadcast on Twitch when the S.O. interrupts the guy's Fortnight game?

The same reason if you worked in a union shop 30, 40, 50 years ago you'd hear the same thing through a 2nd or 3rd party. The difference is people are being caught because it's caught on video, in turn people can actually be prosecuted with evidence.

What? You think "domestic disturbances" are new or something? The upside in some cases is it actually catches the instigator leading to more appropriate outcomes then simply "it's all the males fault." And of course it also catches some people abusing themselves in order to try and get the other person fucked over.