For the Canadian study, undergraduate students were invited to play a violent online game, Call of Duty: Black Ops. Photo: Posrmedia News/Files Canadian researchers, whose earlier work challenged assumptions about violent video games’ links to aggression, have come out with a new study that suggests when people from different social groups cooperate in a video game — even a super violent one — their impressions of one another improve and prejudices diminish.
While not quite ready to declare that violent video games are the path to world peace, the researchers say their findings could have some real-world implications, such as in the development of military training.
“If allied American and British or Canadian forces are training together for an upcoming mission, cooperating in an online military training game before the mission may reduce intergroup bias and improve teamwork during the actual mission,” the researchers wrote in the journal Psychology of Violence.
The study implies that when people play the game with, as opposed to against, members from another group, it can have positive effects on their attitudes toward that other group.
The study was led by Paul Adachi, a PhD student in psychology at Brock University.
For the study, undergraduate students were invited to play a violent online game, Call of Duty: Black Ops. The game was set to a mode in which players work together to shoot and kill zombies.
Some students were told that their playing partner was a fellow Brock university student sitting in an adjacent room, which was true. Other students were led to believe that they were playing with an American student at the University of Buffalo, just across the border, which was false.
Before and after the games, students were asked to rate their attitudes about University of Buffalo students and Americans in general. The study found that after 12 minutes of playing, the students who thought they had been playing with Buffalo students had “significantly more favourable” attitudes toward Buffalo students and Americans in general.
This group of students was also just as likely as those who were told they were playing with Brock students to declare that they and their partner were “one team.”
The findings are significant because other studies have demonstrated that when people play violent video games in which enemy characters belong to other social groups, such as Arabs, prejudice against those other social groups goes up, the researchers wrote.
Given that millions of people all over the world play online games for hours every day, game developers might want to create more cooperative online game formats and have players’ social group identities — such as “American” — appear next to their names, the researchers suggested.
Adachi was not available for comment this week, but Gordon Hodson, a psychology professor at Brock, wrote in a column in Psychology Today this summer that the study’s findings suggest “tremendous potential for video games to be more widely used to both study and reduce intergroup prejudices.”
Just as it is important to study the content of video games, so too is it important to study the context in which they’re played, he said.
Prominent game publisher Activision, which owns the Call of Duty franchise, did not respond to an invitation for comment.
Maj. Andre Berdais, a Canadian Forces spokesman, confirmed this week that video games are playing an increasing role in military training but would not elaborate.
Violent video games were shown in a relatively flattering light in another study put out by the same Brock University research team back in 2011.
The study, which got worldwide attention, suggested that the level of competitiveness in a game had a greater influence on aggressive behaviour than the level of violence.
In the experiment, students were asked to play different styles of video games, with varying degrees of violence or competitiveness. Afterwards, they were asked to prepare a cup of hot sauce for someone who, they were told, was not particularly fond of hot or spicy food.
The results showed that students who had played highly competitive games prepared hotter sauces than those who had played non-competitive games, regardless of the level of violence.
Dquan(at)Postmedia.com
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