“Drive the lane; together, hard!”: An examination of the effects of supportive co-playing and task difficulty on prosocial behavior

As an entertainment technology, video games are a popular social activity that can allow for multiple players to cooperatively engage on-screen challenges. Emerging research has found that when people play together, the resulting teamwork can have beneficial impacts on their prosocial orientations after gameplay–especially when the players are cooperative with one another. The present study wanted to expand the scope of these beneficial interpersonal effects by considering both inter- and intrapersonal factors. In an experimental study (N = 115) we manipulated the difficulty of a game (easy or hard) and the behavior of a confederate teammate (supportive or unsupportive playing style). We found that neither coplayer supportiveness nor game difficulty had an effect on expectations of a teammates’ prosocial behavior or one’s own prosocial behavior towards the teammate after the game (operationalized as willingness to share small amounts of money with one’s teammate after playing). Increased expectations of prosocial behavior from one’s teammate were related to one’s own prosocial behaviors, independent of our manipulations. Considering these results, we propose alternative theoretical approaches to understanding complex social interactions in video games. Furthermore, we suggest to explore other types of manipulations of game difficulty and cooperation between video game players as well as alternative measures of prosocial behavior.

作为一种娱乐技术，电子游戏已成为一种受欢迎的社会活动，它允许多名玩家共同参与屏幕上的挑战。新兴研究指出，当人们共同游戏时，由此产生的团队合作对他们在游戏结束后的亲社会倾向具有积极影响——尤其是在玩家之间表现出合作精神的情况下。本研究旨在通过考虑人际和个体内在因素，扩展这些有益的人际影响范围。在一项实验研究中（N = 115），我们操纵了游戏的难度（简单或困难）以及合作者的队友行为（支持型或非支持型游戏风格）。我们发现，无论是队友的支持性还是游戏的难度，都没有对游戏结束后对队友亲社会行为的预期或自己对队友的亲社会行为（以愿意与队友分享少量金钱来衡量）产生影响。对队友亲社会行为的预期增加与个人的亲社会行为相关，独立于我们的操纵。考虑到这些结果，我们提出了理解电子游戏中复杂社会互动的替代理论方法。此外，我们建议探索游戏难度和电子游戏玩家之间的其他类型操纵，以及亲社会行为的其他衡量方法。