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

Posted by msmash on from the closer-look dept.

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.

12 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Finish them off? by sycodon · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

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    1. Re:Finish them off? by Shaitan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "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.

    2. Re:Finish them off? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

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

    3. Re:Finish them off? by lgw · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

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    4. Re:Finish them off? by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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    5. Re:Finish them off? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

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  2. Curious result by alvinrod · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Have they controlled for variables? by Visarga · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Have they controlled for variables? by alvinrod · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  4. Testing Flawed by zferrini · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  5. Correlation != causation by sinij · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Then why do I hear these stories by Mashiki · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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