Violent Games increase Prosocial Behavior

Dr Shock is utterly biased when it comes to gaming. Especially when Call of Duty is used for research into the topic of possible negative or positive influences of exposure to violent games. This recent research with the action game “Call of Duty” did not support any negative influence of gaming on prosocial behavior or civic engagement. On the contrary this research found some support for increased prosocial behavior and civic engagement in those playing action games especially when their parents were more technically savvy and involved in game play. So all parents should play with their kids, even action games. Probably the team oriented multiplayer options in many of these games increase more social behavior.

Prosocial behavior is caring about the welfare and rights of others, feeling concern and empathy for them, and acting in ways that benefit others

Civic engagement or civic participation has been defined as “Individual and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern.”

Some other interesting information from this article: Violent behaviors among youth has decreased since the 1990s rather than risen while the number of violent games sold has increased since than. As depicted in this fugure

The only drawback of this study is that it’s about correlation not causation and the sample size is somewhat small.

Ferguson, C., & Garza, A. (2010). Call of (civic) duty: Action games and civic behavior in a large sample of youth Computers in Human Behavior DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2010.10.026