It’s only a couple of weeks since my massive coverage of video games research, but another interesting article has come up on the topic. This time – an exploration of personality as it can be used to explain attraction to violent video games.
Chory and Goodboy (2010)1 investigate this in the context of the Big Five personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism/emotional stability. They examine this in the context of the “media uses and gratifications perspective,” which posits that the interaction between basic human needs and society result in a motivation to gratify certain other needs. This perspective isn’t explained much more clearly than this, but as far as I can tell, this means that we are motivated to consume media (e.g. television, video games) in order to interact more directly with society as a whole. Well… okay. If you guys say so.
They do discuss several specific motivations to play video games, which a person might have in any combination:
- arousal – to feel emotions (e.g. to be excited, scared, angry, etc.)
- challenge – to test skills and ability, for your own sake
- competition – to test skills and ability, for others’ sake
- diversion – to reduce stress or for escapism
- fantasy – to take the role/identity of someone else
- social interaction – for social rewards associated with interacting with other people
I would hope, given this setup, that they would test the relationship between the Big Five and these dimensions of video game playing motivation. Unfortunately, they didn’t. They justify this in a peculiar way:
although the current study was grounded in the uses and gratifications perspective, neither motives nor gratifications obtained were assessed. This approach is consistent with that of Krcmar and Kean who suggested that researchers may infer motives for media use by studying the relationship between personality and media. To validate the present study’s findings further, however, future research should measure players’ motives for violent video game play and the gratifications they experience.
Let me paraphrase: “It’s okay that we didn’t measure their motives because another researcher said that was a fine approach. But future, OTHER researchers should definitely measure them.” Thanks for that – real helpful.
So instead, the researchers simply examined the correlations between violent video game play and the Big Five. So this doesn’t really give us any information on the specific motivations for video game play. This is an important point that I’ll get back to. For now, it does give us a more general picture of motivation.
Overall, they found that people high in openness and also people low in agreeableness were more likely to play violent video games. Extraversion was also positively related, but I suspect they did not have a sufficient sample size to find a significant result here. Agreeableness was the strongest of these relationships, though it was not large: r = -.23.
They also conducted some peculiar secondary analyses examining differences in personality based on the violence of people’s “most-played video game” and “second most-played video game” but this is an artificial dichotomy, and as a result, the relationships are artificially inflated, so I don’t place much trust in these values.
What’s peculiar about this study, which the authors discuss, is that it is at odds with some other violent media research. Personality, for example, does not predict attraction to action films, which theoretically contain more violence than other genres. But this may be due to the contamination of the “violence” construct in such studies – action does not necessarily “equal” violence, so these studies must be considered with some caution.
Up to this point, I am with the authors. This seems like a totally innocent study of video-game playing motivation. But then they take is a step further – a step unjustified by their research:
If, as the results of this study suggest, personality motivates frequency of violent video game play and the violent/nonviolent nature of video games individuals play, then certain personality types may be more vulnerable to the effects of these games than others. As playing violent video games is associated with increased aggression, individuals who are less agreeable, more open, more extroverted, and less neurotic may be more likely to develop aggressive tendencies than persons with other personality compositions because they play violent video games more frequently than do these others.
This makes a blanket assumption that “more violent games” leads to “more aggression” – a causal relationship. This has never been demonstrated empirically. Certainly, when children are exposed to violent video games, they are more likely to engage in violent behavior for a short time afterward. But this is true of any displays of violence – children tend to model behavior they witness (see Bandura’s social learning theory). There is little evidence that this is true in adults, and definitely no evidence that exposure to violence over time leads to more aggression over time. This is simply an assertion, and one not backed by the evidence they present here.
This also assumes that “attraction” equals “vulnerability.” That’s not a stretch – it’s broken logic.
This is also where the specific motivations that they did not measure come into play. If the researchers had, for example, linked these personality traits to play for arousal, they might be able to make a case that people playing violent video games did so because they enjoyed the feelings they got from being violent. But unfortunately they did not measure this, and thus these conclusions are overreaching.
At the least, we now can say that open, disagreeable, and possibly also extraverted people are attracted to violent video games. We also know that personality is at least in part genetically driven, which suggests that attraction to violent video games may be partially genetic. And that’s pretty interesting all by itself.
- Chory, R., & Goodboy, A. (2010). Is Basic Personality Related to Violent and Non-Violent Video Game Play and Preferences? Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2010.0076 [↩]
DISCLOSURE: One of the authors on this paper is a doctoral candidate that was previously in one of my classes.
In a cleverly-designed study on the experience of technical difficulties in online training, Sitzmann, Ely, Bell and Bauer (2010)1 made free Microsoft Excel training available online through “community sites” – this likely means Craigslist, Backpage, and other similar classified ad websites. 530 adults ultimately signed up for the study.
After people signed up, they began a four-hour four-module course – but with an unknown catch. Participants were randomly assigned to one of several conditions crossing planted technical difficulties (i.e. participants would encounter errors that made it appear as if the website was poorly designed) in a random number and variety of modules. This isn’t described clearly, but I suspect it means there were fifteen conditions: no errors, errors in 1, 2, 3, 4, 1 and 2, 1 and 3, 1 and 4, 2 and 3, 2 and 4, 3 and 4, 1 2 and 3, 1 2 and 4, 1 3 and 4, and 1 2 3 and 4. Using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), Sitzmann et al. examined the impact of technical difficulties on several outcomes:
- Attrition was 8% higher in the first module when technical difficulties were present, but there was no (or a much smaller) effect in later modules (a rise from 46% to 54%).
- Learning was lower in modules where trainees encountered technical difficulties, though the effect was quite small (a 3% decrease in test scores).
- People who reported greater motivation to complete the training were more likely to learn from it (though the effect was again fairly small), but there was no interaction between motivation and technical difficulties, i.e. regardless of their motivation to complete the training, technical difficulties were equally demotivating.
- People who reported greater motivation to complete the training were more likely to persevere (the effect was a bit larger this time), and there was in fact an interaction between motivation and technical difficulties, i.e. people with higher motivation to complete the training were more likely to persevere in the face of technical difficulties.
The unusual sample for this study is both a strength and a weakness. The authors capture “real” trainees (people with a reason to complete the training – in this case, their own initiative), which is probably more generalizable than college students. But it also makes it more difficult to explain what did happen. The attrition rate in Module 1, even for trainees not experiencing technical difficulties, was 46%. There are many possible explanations for this: 1) perhaps they did not judge the training to be professional enough, 2) perhaps they became bored, 3) perhaps they didn’t like the material, 4) perhaps they decided the material was not appropriate for them, 5) perhaps they decided the material was too simple. Each of these would have different implications for the relationships they found and might implying missingness not at random.
As far as practical implications for online training, this suggests that every effort should be made to avoid technical difficulties, else you might demotivate your employees from completing the training (or perhaps worse, motivate them to complete the training but put in less learning effort than they otherwise would have).
- Sitzmann, T., Ely, K., Bell, B., & Bauer, K. (2010). The effects of technical difficulties on learning and attrition during online training. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 16 (3), 281-292 DOI: 10.1037/a0019968 [↩]
In a recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Williams, Nathanson and Paulhus (2010)1 examined the personality characteristics of scholastic cheaters.
This is a critical issue for me because its connection to applicant cheating behavior. How can we predict which job applicants will lie on their applications, distort their responses, or outright cheat on knowledge and ability tests? And perhaps even more critically, who will act dishonestly on the job? While the subjects of these studies are college students, it does shed some light on this parallel issue.
In this paper, Williams et al. report the results of three studies. In Study 1, they conducted a literature review to identify personality traits likely to predict dishonest behavior. They settled on 1) three Big Five traits (Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience) and 2) the Dark Triad: a combination of narcissism (entitled and grandiose), Machiavellianism (willing to manipulate others for personal goals), and psychopathy (erratic and antisocial). They then correlated these with self-reported cheating, finding significant and reasonably large relationships with the Dark Triad, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.
In Study 2, they repeated this process, but instead of using self-reported cheating, used Turn-It-In scores. If you’re unfamiliar with Turn-It-In, the basic principle is that student essay submissions are compared with a database of previously-turned-in papers and published sources. This produces a percentage score that indicates to what extent the content is plagiarized from other sources. As of the data collection for this study, Turn-It-In scores also included legitimate citations. This was corrected by recoding the Turn-It-In scores into a “plagiarism index” based on scores derived by two research assistants. The specific mechanism by which this index was created is not clear; I wonder if the researchers did not find significant results with the original Turn-It-In scores and decided they needed to recode. In any case, once again, correlations are reported. The Dark Triad all predict plagiarism scores, as does Agreeableness (though not Conscientiousness) and verbal ability.
This makes sense – students who have poorer ability would have a harder time writing essays and would be more likely to turn to plagiarism, regardless of their personality. Though I wonder if there are any interactions.
In Study 3, the authors examined the mediators of psychopathy, i.e. determining what is the motivation for psychopathic individuals to cheat? The procedure for this study was a little odd. The authors took a previously existing self-reported reasons-for-cheating scale, conducted a factor analysis to condense it into three categories (unrestrained achievement, fear of punishment, and moral inhibition), and then examined a mediational model using bootstrapping. They determined from this that the three motivation-to-cheat categories partially mediated the relationship between psychopathy and self-reported cheating.
Again, Study 3 was a little odd to me. They clearly had the potential to examine the relationship between all of the Dark Triad and Turn-It-In scores in addition to the single trait they looked at, and the less interesting outcome. It seems a little peculiar to choose this particular set, and no explanation is given for choosing this one potentially mediated relationship instead of one of the other 5.
This makes me wonder if there is something about psychopathy in particular that makes it unusual – perhaps a low base rate? Means and SDs are not given for study variables, so is a possibility. The specific questions used for motivation-to-cheat also seem like they would have low base rates, for example: “I cheat because I’m not honest/moral.” I can’t imagine many individuals answer positively to this. So perhaps we are just capturing, in a sense, the worst of the worst?
In any case, Study 1 and Study 2 are interesting in and of themselves, though I wish they had included both self-reported cheating and observed cheating in the same study. We can say pretty confidently that the Dark Triad and some of the Big Five predict cheating.
The next logical question, though: what next? Even if we can profile cheaters (either college students or applicants), what can we do with this information?
The authors suggest something that strikes me as a bit odd, especially shortly after a warning about causal inference:
More generally, educators should benefit from awareness that the most probable cheaters are those low in scholastic preparedness
and high in psychopathy. Attention to the first group requires redoubling efforts to prevent students from falling behind.
There is nothing here to suggest that this approach would work. Verbal ability was captured using a vocabulary test, which has little to do with course success. If anything, this suggests that college students with lower intelligence or are unprepared for college are more susceptible to the lure of easy high grades, which isn’t all that surprising. And arguably, the highly intelligent cheaters are the ones we should be watching most closely.
- Williams, K., Nathanson, C., & Paulhus, D. (2010). Identifying and profiling scholastic cheaters: Their personality, cognitive ability, and motivation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 16 (3), 293-307 DOI: 10.1037/a0020773 [↩]