Does playing video games with violent content temporarily increase aggressive inclinations? A pre-registered experimental study

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Abstract

The current study tested whether participants who played a violent video game (VVG) would exhibit increased aggressive inclinations relative to those who played a non-violent video game (NVG). Participants (N = 386) were randomly assigned to play a VVG or a NVG prior to presumably interacting with another (non-existent) participant. We then measured participants' aggressive inclinations: Participants reported how many pins they would like to stick into a “voodoo doll” representing their interaction partner, and participants reported how likely they would be to actually harm their interaction partner. We did not detect any differences between conditions for several outcomes: the amount of aggressive inclinations displayed during the interaction, the number of pins participants chose to stick into a representation of their interaction partner, and participants' self-reported likelihood they would harm their interaction partner. Thus, the hypothesis that playing a VVG would increase aggressive inclinations was not supported in this study. Exploratory analyses revealed associations between (1) participants' self-reported likelihood to aggress and perceptions of the game as frustrating or difficult, (2) gender and higher levels of pin selection, and (3) participants' self-identification as a gamer and lower levels of pin selection.

Section snippets

Theoretical underpinnings of how VVGs might affect aggressive inclinations

The hypothesis that exposure to VVGs increases aggression is best derived from social-cognitive theories of aggression, the best known of which is the General Aggression Model (GAM; e.g., Bushman & Anderson, 2002). The GAM proposes that situational factors (e.g., the presence of aggressive stimuli, hot temperatures) and person factors (e.g., biological factors, personality factors) serve as inputs that affect an individual's thoughts, feelings, and physiological arousal which, in turn, may

Study overview

The current study was designed to test the hypothesis that playing VVGs is causally associated with increased aggressive inclinations relative to playing NVGs. Specifically, we randomly assigned participants to play either a VVG or a NVG. Then, participants were given an opportunity (a) to aggress during a brief interaction with another person, (b) to symbolically inflict harm by choosing to stick pins into a representation of their interaction partner (e.g., DeWall et al., 2013), and (c) to

Sample size selection

For the VVG-aggression association, both Anderson et al. (2010) and Greitemeyer and Mügge (2014) estimated point estimates of the population effect size to be about r = .20, which is equivalent to d = 0.41. Using a Type 1 error rate of .05, we estimated that we needed a minimum sample of 190 participants to detect an effect of d = 0.41 with power of .80.

Sample selection and description

Three hundred eighty-six participants completed the study. During the funneled debriefing, 66 participants expressed suspicion about whether they

Pre-specified hypotheses and planned analyses

Our main hypothesis was that participants who played the VVG would exhibit higher levels of aggressive inclinations than participants who played the NVG. This hypothesis was separately analyzed for each outcome variable in a two-step process. First, each dependent variable was analyzed with the type of game played as the sole predictor. Second, to address this issue of potentially confounding variables due to differences between the games, we planned to enter participants' ratings of the game

Aggression during the interaction

Participants' responses to the mild provocation during the interaction were used as a measure of aggression. Each response was rated for aggressiveness by samples of MTurk workers ranging in size from nine and 24 MTurk workers (Mean number of raters per response = 20). A total of nine surveys were created and contained the verbatim responses of approximately 50 participants, so each rater provided approximately 50 ratings. Raters viewed each response and reported their subjective judgments of how

Exploratory analysis results

The analyses in the following sections were not pre-specified. For brevity, we only included data from the naïve sample in the exploratory analyses.

A note of caution

A peer reviewer rightly noted that the average perceptions of participants' interaction have never (to our knowledge) been used as a measure of displayed aggression. Indeed, within the naïve sample, the average rating of participants' interaction was weakly associated with pin usage, rs = 0.13, p = .01, and completely unassociated with self-reported likelihood to harm their interaction partner, r = 0.00, p = .93. This should temper any conclusions that can be drawn from analyses with this variable.

Discussion

The results of the current study do not support the hypothesis that playing a VVG increased aggressive inclinations relative to playing a NVG. The one possible exception to this conclusion is pin usage among our naïve sample, which showed a statistical trend in the hypothesized direction. However, this trend was weak given the statistical power of the current study, the lack of corroboration by the other measures of aggressive inclinations, and our Bayesian analyses, which suggested that this

Implications for researchers

In addition to our belief that the current study is a useful contribution to the research on the effects of VVGs on aggressive inclinations, we believe that the current results have implications for future research in this area. First, we believe that pre-registration of methods, pre-specification of analytic strategy, and the open sharing of data are crucial contributions to the ongoing debate on whether playing VVGs causes aggression. Second, we observed relationships between how difficult

Conclusion

The current study tested the hypothesis that playing a VVG would subsequently increase aggressive inclinations. Despite having high statistical power, straightforward methods, and straightforward measures, there was no observed difference between the aggressive inclinations displayed by participants who played a NVG and participants who played a VVG.

Because the current results are inconsistent with some previous research, some readers may have reservations about some aspect of our methods or

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