The effects of video games on altruism

When we play the role of a heroic do-gooder, does it influence our behavior? Can it inspire acts of gallantry…or, failing that, make us a little more kind and generous? Experiments suggests this is possible, at least when it comes to short-term responses. Read more about the effects of video games on altruism.

children dressed in fancy superhero costumes

What are the effects of video games on social behavior? As I note elsewhere, it isn’t entirely clear. But there’s good reason to think it depends on the game’s specific content.

For instance, violent games may make kids a bit more aggressive immediately after play. They might also make players feel less sympathetic or responsive toward victims of violence — at least temporarily.

By contrast, non-violent, prosocial games (where players take on the role of a friendly or heroic helper) have been linked with better behavior. When researchers have asked kids about their gaming habits and social tendencies, they’ve found evidence of a modest correlation: The more time kids spend playing prosocial video games, the more likely they are to report engaging in real-world acts of kindness (Prot et al 2014; Gentile et al 2009).

But can we prove that playing prosocial video games causes a boost in prosociality?

And — if so — how far does it go? Do gamers simply become more pleasant, more polite? Or does acting like a “good guy” encourage players to behave in ways that are truly altruistic? To take risks, or pay a cost, in order to help another individual?

These, of course, are modern, high-tech spinoffs of a much older question: When we engage in role-playing activities – pretending to perform prosocial acts — does the behavior “rub off” on us?

It certainly sounds plausible. After all, it’s clear that role-playing can be instructive. It can show us how to respond in a variety of situations, and help us practice or rehearse these responses.

In fact, this is probably one of the evolutionary functions of pretend play: In societies around the world, children playfully simulate the performance of crucial tasks they need to learn, such as childcare (Lew-Levy et al 2017; Lew-Levy and Boyette 2018; Lancy 2022).

Moreover, we know that our behavior is influenced by what we’ve recently been thinking about or perceiving. Psychologists call this priming, and it’s well-established in experiments.

For example, if you prompt religious people to process information about their religion (by exposing them to relevant words, like “sacred” or “God”), they become more prosocial immediately afterwards – more inclined to share a prize, and less inclined to cheat on a test (Shariff et al 2016).

So it’s not a big stretch to think that role-playing during a video game could influence post-gaming behavior. Maybe it could even make us more inclined to altruism. But how can we know?

Experimental evidence: People act more sympathetic or friendly immediately after playing prosocial video games.

It’s been demonstrated in several studies (Gentile et al 2009; Saleem et al 2012; Yoon and Vargus 2014), including a recent experiment on 176 preschoolers, where kids were randomly assigned to play one of two games:

a prosocial video game (“Dora Saves the Dog”), where players help a dog escape from a trap; or
or a socially neutral video game (“Baba Bear”), in which players click buttons to electronically “paint” pictures.

The gaming session lasted 20 minutes. Would children become noticeably friendlier after rescuing the digital dogs? To find out, the researchers presented kids with a follow-up task: They asked the preschoolers to choose a puzzle for another youngster to solve.

The kids weren’t given much information about the child who would be tackling this puzzle. Only that it would be one of their preschool classmates. But they were told that this child would receive a reward if he or she successfully solved the puzzle, so kids had the power to help or hurt.

Would they choose a puzzle that was very difficult? Or would they pick out something less challenging, so that the peer would be more likely to win the reward?

It depended on what sort of game they had been playing earlier. Kids who had played the prosocial game tended to choose easier puzzles (Li and Zhang 2022).

So there’s reason to think that pretending to perform prosocial acts (in a video game) can indeed affect behavior in the real world. At least temporarily. It may make us a bit nicer.

But notice that the kids in this experiment didn’t have to give up anything to choose an easier puzzle. It didn’t put them at risk, or leave them paying any costs. So while they were helping someone, they weren’t necessarily demonstrating altruism. What about that?

Experimental evidence: College students who played a heroic simulation game were more likely intervene on behalf of a real-life victim

In this experimental study, researchers Tobias Greitemeyer and Sylvia Osswald assigned college undergraduates to play one of two video games:

Tetris (a puzzle game that lacks social content), or
City Crisis (a simulation game in which the player takes on the role of a rescue helicopter pilot who saves people from fires and other threats).

Each participant played for 10 minutes, sitting in a quiet room where a young female experimenter was working. Then an interruption occurred — a deception staged by the researchers.

A young man (an actor) entered the room. He approached the female experimenter, and he seemed angry. He said to her:

“Ah, there you are! I was looking for you in the whole building! Why do you ignore me like that? Why do you do that to me? Now you have to talk to me!”

The man talked loudly, then shouted and kicked a trash can. He also pulled the arm of the woman, attempting to force her to leave the room with him. Throughout, the female experimenter acted passively. She repeated the same sentences in a quiet voice:

“Shush, be quiet please. I have to work in here, I cannot talk to you. You are disturbing the experiment. Please do not be so loud.”

How did people react? The researchers recorded whether or not each participant did anything to help the woman, like ask her if she needed assistance.

And the results suggest that playing City Crisis–the prosocial video game–made a difference. Ten out of 18 people who played City Crisis intervened. By contrast, only 4 of the 18 people who played Tetris did so.

It’s a small study, and the results should be interpreted with caution. But the results don’t stand alone.

Similar experiments suggest that playing violent video games makes people less likely to take a risk and help when they witness a person in trouble (Anderson et al 2010).

And more recent research on young children suggests that they, too, may experience an “altruism effect” after playing prosocial video games.

Experimental evidence: Preschoolers more likely to engage in generous helping and sharing immediately after playing prosocial video games

Anat Shoshani and her colleagues conducted two experiments, each involving more than 185 child participants between the ages of 3 and 6.

In both experiments, every child was randomly assigned to play one of three video games:

Baby Hazel Sibling Care, a prosocial game where the player helps take care of an infant;
Cat Invader Galaxy Shooter, a game where the player attacks opponents; and
Sandbox Pixel Coloring, a socially neutral game where the player selects the correct colors to complete an image.

Each child played the video game for 15 minutes, and then researchers conducted several tests.

As you might guess, these tests didn’t involve exposing children to threats of violence. Nobody wants to frighten young children, and I doubt any ethics board would give the greenlight to such an experimental design.

Instead, the researchers created situations in which children would have the chance to be generous – to give away time, labor, or resources. And it worked like this.

In the first experiment, the video gaming session was followed a toy session…with subsequent distractions.

After the video game session ended, an adult experimenter gave the child some toys to play with, and the duo played together for a couple minutes. But then the adult appeared to have a difficulty: She “accidentally” scattered office supplies (some rubber bands) all over the floor.

The adult started trying to pick them up, without explicitly asking the child for assistance. But if the child didn’t pitch in, the adult spoke out loud to herself, hinting “It’s pretty difficult to do this alone.” So hopefully all the kids in this experiment got the message.

What would they do next? Would they quit playing to lend a helping hand? If so, they’d be paying a small cost to help, and this could count as an act of altruism (albeit a modest one). But the testing didn’t end there.

After the rubber bands were picked up (with or without assistance), the adult presented kids with other situations that might trigger helpfulness. For example, the adult wanted to put the rubber bands in a jar, but it was hard for her to unscrew the jar’s lid with her hands full of rubber bands.

By the end of the experiment, kids had been exposed to a total of four opportunities to offer spontaneous help. Researchers analyzed the outcomes, and what did they discover?

Most children helped to some degree, with older individuals stepping up more frequently than younger kids. But regardless of age, the total amount of helping depended on the type of video game they had been playing earlier.

For instance, the youngest kids (under the age of 5 years) showed minimal levels of helping after playing either the violent or neutral game. Under these conditions, they pitched in about once, on average.

But after playing the prosocial game, these 3- and 4-year-olds increased their rates of helping by more than 200%.

Among older kids, the results were less dramatic, but still quite noticeable. Their helping rates were highest under the prosocial gaming condition – nearly twice as high when compared with the violent gaming condition, and 25% higher versus the neutral gaming condition (Shoshani et al 2021).

Then there are the results of second experiment, which tested children’s willingness to share a resource.

In this experiment, a different group of preschoolers (more than 200 kids total) were randomly assigned to play video games, as outlined above. But instead of following up the gaming session with a presentation of toys, the researchers handed children a set of prizes (10 colorful stickers).

And now the kids faced a direct test of their generosity: They were tasked with allocating the stickers between themselves and another child. There was no overt pressure to share, nor were kids told the identity of their potential beneficiary. They were simply informed that they could decide for themselves what, if anything, to give away to an anonymous student at their preschool.

Psychology nerds will recognize as the “Dictator Game,” though it isn’t much of a game. It’s simply a social decision: When you’re free to choose, do you act generously? Or do you keep most or all the loot for yourself?

In this case, most children were inclined to share at least some of the stickers. But kids were a bit more generous if they had recently played the prosocial (as opposed to the neutral or violent) game.

Instead of giving away an average of 4 stickers, they gave away approximately 5 – dividing up the rewards evenly between themselves and their beneficiary (Shoshani et al 2021).

Does this mean that prosocial video games can have important or lasting impact on behaviors like sharing, generosity, and costly helping?

intense young boy playing video game on a couch

Not necessarily. The experiments mentioned here report only short-term effects. Moreover, we can’t assume that future studies — using similar methods — will replicate these results.

We should also remember the correlational studies aren’t reporting big differences in the real-world behavior of children or adolescents who play prosocial video games. Averaged across players, the effects are pretty small.

So this isn’t the kind of evidence that justifies, say, a school district spending their limited funds on prosocial video games to improve student behavior. Nor should we think of prosocial gaming as a good replacement for real-world social interactions. The research suggests that prosocial video games inspire more kindness than do neutral or violent games. It doesn’t tell us how these compare with other, “unplugged” social skills activities – like pretend play, or certain cooperative, live action games.

But if we’ve already decided to introduce children to video games, the research offers us another good reason to downplay violent content and emphasize prosocial themes.

And it’s worth noting that there are other ways that video games can shape prosocial behavior. When kids play video games cooperatively – working together on the same team – they may learn to collaborate in other contexts (e.g., Badatala et al 2016).

References: The effects of video games on altruism

Anderson CA, Shibuya A, Ihori N, Swing EL, Bushman BJ, Sakamoto A, Rothstein HR, and Saleem M. 2010. Violent video game effects on aggression, empathy, and prosocial behavior in eastern and western countries: a meta-analytic review. 136(2):151-73.

Badatala, A, Leddo J, Islam A, Patel K, and Surapaneni PR. 2016. The effects of playing cooperative and competitive video games on teamwork and team performance. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Research 2: 24-28.

Bargh JA, Chen M, Burrows L. 1996. Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71 (2): 230-244.

Bushman BJ and Anderson CA. 2009. Comfortably numb: desensitizing effects of violent media on helping others. Psychol Sci. 20(3):273-7.

Greitemeyer T and Osswald S. 2009. Prosocial Video Games Reduce Aggressive Cognitions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 21(4):463-70.

Lancy DF. 2022. The anthropology of childhood. Third Edition. Cambridge University Press.

Lew-Levy S and Boyette AH. 2018. Evidence for the Adaptive Learning Function of Work and Work-Themed Play among Aka Forager and Ngandu Farmer Children from the Congo Basin. Hum Nat. 29(2):157-185.

Lew-Levy S, Reckin R, Lavi N, Cristóbal-Azkarate J, Ellis-Davies K. 2017. How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Subsistence Skills?: A Meta-Ethnographic Review. Hum Nat. 28(4):367-394.

Li H. and Zhang Q. 2023. Effects of Prosocial Video Games on Prosocial Thoughts and Prosocial Behaviors. Social Science Computer Review 41(3): 1063-1080.

Prot S, Gentile DA, Anderson CA, Suzuki K, Swing E, Lim KM, Horiuchi Y, Jelic M, Krahé B, Liuqing W, Liau AK, Khoo A, Petrescu PD, Sakamoto A, Tajima S, Toma RA, Warburton W, Zhang X, Lam BC. 2014. Long-term relations among prosocial-media use, empathy, and prosocial behavior. Psychol Sci. 25(2):358-68.

Saleem M, Anderson CA and Gentile DA 2012. Effects of prosocial, neutral, and violent video games on children’s helpful and hurtful behaviors. Aggressive Behavior 38: 281-287.

Shariff AF, Willard AK, Andersen T, Norenzayan A. 2016. Religious Priming: A Meta-Analysis With a Focus on Prosociality. Pers Soc Psychol Rev. 20(1):27-48.

Shoshani A, Nelke S, and Girtler I. 2021. Tablet applications as socializing platforms: the effects of prosocial touch screen applications on young children’s prosocial behavior. Comput Hum Behav 127:107077.

Yoon G and Vargas PT. 2014. Know Thy Avatar: The Unintended Effect of Virtual-Self Representation on Behavior. Psychological Science 25(4), 1043–1045.

Written content last modified 4/2024. Earlier versions of this article were previously published on Parenting Science with the current title, as well as under the title, “Playing helper and hero: The effects of video games on our willingness to take risks”.

image of superhero children by istock / RawPixel