Pro-Social Behavior Impacted by Play Style & Social Context in Games:

My graduate research sought to answer the question of how environment and social context impact how players treat one another post-game after becoming well-versed in the controversy surrounding video games, aggression, and online toxicity. My theory was that these past studies all looked at games with a very specific environment and social context (online and competitive) and then broadly applied their findings to video games as a whole, leaving out any study of cooperative and “couch multiplayer” games which may have resulted in less tendency towards toxicity. The purpose of the research was to determine if face-to-face game play (social context) would result in more prosocial behaviors in both cooperative as well as competitive game play (play style), as compared to online play. Participants played Mario Kart 8 in pairs competitively or cooperatively and online or face-to-face.  Participants then played a game where each decided how many dimes to give to the other participant over ten trials in order to measure generosity.  The optimal strategy for both participants is to always give the other player the maximum number of dimes because if they both do this they both leave with as much money as they could possibly get. This game is not designed to be competitive on its own, and so is subject to the expectations brought to it by the players. A 2×2 between-subjects factorial ANOVA was calculated for the mean number of dimes given to the other participant.  Results showed that participants who played the Mario Kart 8 video game under the cooperative play style condition gave significantly more dimes (p < 0.001) to the other participant (M = 24.96) than participants who played the video game under the competitive play style condition (M = 18.67), with a large effect size. The effect for whether the video game was played face-to-face or online was only marginally significant (p = 0.05). In short, whether or not players were in competitive or cooperative matches had a big influence on generosity with the online or face-to-face context to a much lesser extent. These results suggest that the cooperative or competitive nature of the game being played can have positive or negative impacts on prosocial behaviors such as generosity.