The Influence of Adolescents' Moral Salience on Actions and Entertainment Experience in Interactive Media

Abstract

The current study examines the role of US and German adolescents' innate morality in influencing decisions in and subsequent enjoyment of an interactive media environment. Moving beyond models of moral reasoning, morality was assessed using Moral Foundations Theory allowing for an intuitionist perspective on morality. In an experimental design, adolescents aged 12 to 14 years from the United States (N = 91) and Germany (N = 94), played a modified computer game simulation where they were confronted with the decision to violate or uphold various aspects of morality. Data suggest that in the group of German adolescents moral salience leads to a decrease in decisions to commit moral violations, while in the group of US adolescents decisions to commit moral violations appeared to be random. Enjoyment was not influenced by moral module salience in either group.

Keywords:

• morality
• adolescents
• video games
• entertainment
• decision making

Notes

^1. A recent version of MFT (Haidt, 2012) has advocated a sixth provisional foundation: Liberty/Oppression. As of now, this foundation yet to be fully explicated or included in MFT instruments and as such, was not available for examination in our study.

^2. In addition to the theoretical reasons for our sample we must also point out that the video game used in our study was rated as 12+ (Germany)/ Teen (13+, US) rating, thus restricting our ability to use it with any population below these recommended age limits in accordance with our host institution's ethical guidelines.

^3. Players could choose between male avatars with generic portraits named “Max Mustermann” in the German version and “John Doe” in the English version and female avatars with generic portraits named “Maxi Musterfrau” in the German version and “Mary Doe” in the English version.

^4. Our modified game relied on characters from the in-built game library of the latest in Aurora toolset version. All of the modified game files are available upon request from the first author of this study. We note that in order to use the files from this study, an individual would need to own a licensed copy of Neverwinter Nights (including all expansion sets), which is available for purchase from any reputable video game store.

^5. Remarks in parenthesis added to emphasize the moral module that each response item corresponded to.

^6. One could indeed argue that one way to test the successful violation of a moral module would be to test the score indicated by the participants against the median score of 2.5 (for a 1to 4 scale). However, as there is no absolute score for a violation, one can only make a comparison with the other modules.