New Study: Playing as a Terrorist in Games Can Increase Moral Sensitivity

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July 1, 2014

A new study published in the academic journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking has found a connection between violent and immoral acts in video games and increased guilt and sympathy in the player.

The researchers looked at a group of 185 people during this study, and they were split into two groups. One group was put into guilt-inducing situations--playing as a terrorist in a game or being asked to think of guilty memories--and the other group was used as a control--playing as a UN peacekeeper or recalling memories that didn't induce guilt.

After completing the tasks, the participants filled out moral surveys and a guilt scale to quantify their moral sensitivity. The results of the study found that elevated feelings of guilt were correlated with the violence wrought by the terrorists in-game.

Matthew Grizzard, assistant professor at the University at Buffalo and leader of the study, explains, "We found that after a subject played a violent video game, they felt guilt and that guilt was associated with greater sensitivity toward the two particular domains they violated -- those of care/harm and fairness/reciprocity."

This also means that people who played as UN peacekeeping soldiers, even if they committed the same acts, did not feel the same spike in guilt as the people who played as the terrorists. "An American who played a violent game 'as a terrorist' would likely consider his avatar's unjust and violent behavior -- violations of the fairness/reciprocity and harm/care domains -- to be more immoral than when he or she performed the same acts in the role of a 'UN peacekeeper,'" Grizzard states.

Lately, studies on the effect of violent video games have been contradictory: past findings have shown that violent video games could increase aggression. And even as recently as February, an Ohio State professor stated that violent video games desensitize people to the "pain and suffering of others."

As with any study, we must wait for the findings to be replicated and more research to be done before we can say anything conclusive. However, this is an interesting shift in the science behind violence in games. Hopefully this will motivate more extensive research into the positive and negative effects of video games.