Violent video games may inhibit a person's ability to feel guilt, according to a new study.
Previous studies reveal that committing unjustified acts of violence triggered guilt in gamers, but new research from the University of Buffalo recently found evidence that the moral reaction triggered by the initial exposure to a video game wanes with experience.
Researchers in the latest study wanted to see whether playing violent video games leads to emotional desensitization and whether that desensitization can be carried over to other play or real-life scenarios.
Participants were asked to play alternative versions of the same violent game for the first four days, in which half were assigned to play the moral United Nations soldier and the other half to play an immoral terrorist soldier. However, all participants were assigned to play a new game as a terrorist on the fifth day of the study.
Study results revealed that guilt was significantly reduced on Day 5 in participants who had previously been assigned to play the immoral terrorist soldier.
"Results indicate two things. First, habituation occurs over repeated game play: Repeated exposure decreased the ability of the original game to elicit guilt. Second, the decreased ability to elicit guilt can generalize to other game-play experiences," the research team wrote.
"The current study provides causal, longitudinal evidence regarding the potential for video game play to lead to emotional desensitization with regard to future video game-play experiences," they added.
Lead researcher Matthew Grizzard, assistant professor of communication at the University of Buffalo, believes that there are two arguments for the desensitization effect found in the study.
"One is that people are deadened because they've played these games over and over again. This makes the gamers less sensitive to all guilt-inducing stimuli," he said.
"This second argument says the desensitization we're observing is not due to being numb to violence because of repeated play, but rather because the gamers' perception has adapted and started to see the game's violence differently," Grizzard explained. "Through repeated play, gamers may come to understand the artificiality of the environment and disregard the apparent reality provided by the game's graphics."
The findings were published in March 30 issue of the journal Media Psychology.
