Greitmeyer and Osswald (2010) Playing Prosocial Video Games Increases Empathy and Decreases Schadenfreude
Thesis/Purpose: Greitmeyer and Osswald analyze how empathy might increase by playing video games and decrease the pleasure for someone else’s misfortunes, as well as testing the idea that the more exposure to prosocial video games someone has the more their “schadenfreude” will decrease. Methods: There were 56 students that participated in this study. There were 28 men and 28 women exactly. Each was randomly assigned to play either a prosocial or neutral video game. The participants were all tested individually as opposed to testing together. Each participant was a part of two different studies in order to get the best results to analyze whether the purpose of the study is affective. One of the studies was about the “enjoyment of classical computer games” and the other was about “impression formation.” The participants either played Lemmings which went under the category of a prosocial video game or they played Tetris which fell under the neutral game. They were told to play the g...