Attitudes towards videogame violence and moral disengagement

[cara1993]

Hi,
I am aiming to see if personality traits are associated with moral disengagement and attitudes towards committing violence in violent/shooter video games, such as Halo, Half-life, etc. Moral disengagement allows people who feel uncomfortable with their actions in a particular situation to justify their behavior and relieve feelings of guilt/negative affect. The traits I will be investigating will be locus of control, empathy, affect and immersive tendencies (i.e how easily someone becomes absorbed in a game/film).

I also want to investigate whether moral disengagement is associated with a positive attitude towards committing violence in a video game context- research has suggested that people who have a tendency to disengage from their morals easily are more likely to view violence as acceptable, because they feel less guilt due to their disengagement.

So if you have a spare ten mins and play shooter/violent games, please take part!

COPY THIS LINK- https://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/ntupsychology/videogames/

Thankyou for your response!

 

[Racecarlock]

I don't care about pixelated life forms simply because they're pixelated life forms and can easily be brought back to life by loading a previous save or the game itself respawning that person.

The reason people don't care about pedestrians in GTA is that pedestrians in GTA infinitely spawn and there is nothing truly unique about them.

It sucks when a real person dies because there will never be someone with that unique set of traits again. There might be similar people, but even twins often develop separate personalities.

The same cannot be said of any character model in a game. Because the game can just make that same dude again. Or you can reload a save. It's that simple. That's actually why moral choice doesn't work in games. There are no consequences which cannot be reverted by simply pressing "New Game". So all it really does is make you play the game twice to see both good and bad endings.

People can tell the difference between real people and digital people. So sure, I might find digital violence perfectly acceptable. But I still hate real war and real violence, because real people die and get hurt. Although if it's in a safe(ish) context like boxing or legal MMA or maybe even football, then I'm fine there. But only because there are precautions in place to try and make sure people don't die or even get permanent injuries.

 

[skurz]

Psychological surveys are always enjoyable, personally, especially ones that give some new questions to think about. I'm not really expecting a reply, but are you by any chance a Psych grad student?

I noticed the absence of "N/A" from your "Rank from 1--#" answer sets.
Trying to be as truthful with my answers, sometimes survey-takers just can't relate or answer a question, and "Not Applicable" is the best answer that won't skew your results.

Anyway, exactly like Racecarlock said above: pixel-life is pixel-life, not real-life. I enjoy the variety of negative and positive emotions I feel from video games, but real life violence makes me feel depressed and sick.