Tobias Rothmund

Of Virtual Victims and Victimized Virtues: Differential Effects of Experienced Aggression in Video Games on Social Cooperation

Two experimental studies were used to investigate how interacting with aggressive virtual characters in video games affects trust and cooperation of players. Study 1 demonstrates that experiencing virtual aggression from a victim’s perspective can impair players’ investments in a subsequent common goods dilemma situation. This effect is mediated by reduced expectations of trust in the cooperativeness of interaction partners. In Study 2 the same effect was replicated by using a different cooperation task and by investigating the moderating role of justice sensitivity from a victim’s perspective as a dispositional factor. Participants transferred less money to an unknown partner in a trust game after exposure to aggressive nonplayer characters in a video game. This effect was stronger for people high in victim sensitivity. Results of both studies can be interpreted in line with the sensitivity to mean intentions model and add to the body of research on violent media effects.

Implicit Measures and Media Effects Research: Challenges and Opportunities

Although implicit measures are now widely used in different areas of psychology, they have received only little attention in communication science. This paper discusses the potential benefits of implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) for media effects research. We first address more general theoretical and methodological issues and introduce some practical challenges that come along with implicit methods. The paper concludes by recommending that implicit measures should be added to the communication methods toolkit, but that researchers should carefully decide whether (and which) implicit measures really make sense in a particular case of research.

Sensibilität für Ungerechtigkeit

Zusammenfassung. Menschen unterscheiden sich in ihrer Sensibilitat fur Ungerechtigkeit. Diese Unterschiede sind stabil und lassen sich uber einzelne Falle von Ungerechtigkeit hinweg generalisieren. Ungerechtigkeitssensibilitat gliedert sich in vier Facetten: Opfersensibilitat, Beobachtersensibilitat, Nutzniesersensibilitat und Tatersensibilitat. Diese Facetten korrelieren systematisch untereinander. Wir stellen Untersuchungen vor, die Zusammenhange der Facetten mit egoistischen und prosozialen Dispositionen und mit egoistischem und prosozialem Verhalten in experimentellen Spielen sowie mit Zivilcourage aufzeigen. In diesen Untersuchungen lassen sich die Facetten klar differenzieren. Wahrend Beobachter-, Nutznieser- und Tatersensibilitat in einem genuinen Bedurfnis nach Gerechtigkeit zu wurzeln scheinen, beinhaltet Opfersensibilitat auch eine selbstbezogene Sorge, ausgebeutet zu werden. Vermittelnde Emotionen differenzieren weiterhin zwischen Beobachter- und Nutzniesersensibilitat: Beobachtersensibilitat f...

Proposal of a Nonlinear Interaction of Person and Situation (NIPS) model

Marshall and Brown (2006) proposed a Traits as Situational Sensitivities (TASS) Model, which implies a systematic person × situation interaction. We review this model and show that it suffers from several limitations. We extend and modify the model in order to obtain a symmetric pattern of levels and effects for both person and situation factors. Our suggestions result in a general Nonlinear Interaction of Person and Situation (NIPS) Model. The NIPS model bears striking similarities to the Rasch model. Based on the symmetric nature of the NIPS model, we generalize the concept of weak and strong situations to individuals and propose the concepts of weak and strong persons. Finally, we discuss psychological mechanisms that might explain the NIPS pattern and offer ideas for future research.

Victim Sensitivity and the Accuracy of Social Judgments

Recent theorizing on the relation between victim sensitivity and unethical behavior predicts that victim sensitivity is related to an asymmetrical focus on cues associated with untrustworthiness compared to cues associated with trustworthiness. This hypothesis and its consequences for the accuracy of social predictions are investigated in this article. In Study 1, participants rated the trustworthiness of 35 computer-animated faces that differed in their emotional expression. People high in victim sensitivity rated neutral and hostile faces more untrustworthy than people low in victim sensitivity, whereas no such effect was found for friendly faces. In Study 2, participants predicted the cooperativeness of 56 targets on the basis of minimal information. The accuracy of predictions was negatively related to victim sensitivity, and people high in victim sensitivity systematically underestimated targets’ cooperativeness. Thus, the asymmetrical focus on untrustworthiness cues among victim-sensitive individuals seems to impair rather than improve their social judgments.

Social Identity Threat Motivates Science-Discrediting Online Comments

Experiencing social identity threat from scientific findings can lead people to cognitively devalue the respective findings. Three studies examined whether potentially threatening scientific findings motivate group members to take action against the respective findings by publicly discrediting them on the Web. Results show that strongly (vs. weakly) identified group members (i.e., people who identified as “gamers”) were particularly likely to discredit social identity threatening findings publicly (i.e., studies that found an effect of playing violent video games on aggression). A content analytical evaluation of online comments revealed that social identification specifically predicted critiques of the methodology employed in potentially threatening, but not in non-threatening research (Study 2). Furthermore, when participants were collectively (vs. self-) affirmed, identification did no longer predict discrediting posting behavior (Study 3). These findings contribute to the understanding of the formation of online collective action and add to the burgeoning literature on the question why certain scientific findings sometimes face a broad public opposition.

The effects of social identity threat and social identity affirmation on laypersons' perception of scientists.

Public debates about socio-scientific issues (e.g. climate change or violent video games) are often accompanied by attacks on the reputation of the involved scientists. Drawing on the social identity approach, we report a minimal group experiment investigating the conditions under which scientists are perceived as non-prototypical, non-reputable, and incompetent. Results show that in-group affirming and threatening scientific findings (compared to a control condition) both alter laypersons’ evaluations of the study: in-group affirming findings lead to more positive and in-group threatening findings to more negative evaluations. However, only in-group threatening findings alter laypersons’ perceptions of the scientists who published the study: scientists were perceived as less prototypical, less reputable, and less competent when their research results imply a threat to participants’ social identity compared to a non-threat condition. Our findings add to the literature on science reception research and have implications for understanding the public engagement with science.

Justice as a Moral Motive

As theoretical considerations and empirical research suggest, human behaviour is guided by a fundamental justice motive. In the present chapter, we discuss two theoretical constructs that have been proposed to capture inter-individual differences in the strength of the justice motive: belief in a just world and justice sensitivity.

The Psychology of Social Justice in Political Thought and Action

Psychological research at the intersection of social justice and political behavior is part of the vibrant, growing field of political psychology. The present chapter addresses this research and focuses especially on justice-related thoughts, feelings, and actions of political laypersons. We highlight three lines of research that link laypersons’ evaluations of distributive and procedural injustice with political attitudes and behavior. First, political science and psychology provide evidence that beliefs about social justice reflect key elements in political ideologies. For example, conservatives (a) are less likely to prioritize issues of fairness and social justice when making moral judgments, (b) are more likely to evaluate distributive justice in terms of principles of merit than equality, and (c) more readily interpret requests for public support on behalf of disadvantaged groups as undeserved, in comparison to liberals. These findings are discussed in regard to psychological theories linking political ideology with motivated social cognition. Second, we outline how perceived procedural justice and perceived political legitimacy are related and mutually affect each other. The more political authorities are seen as reigning in line with criteria of procedural justice, the more they are perceived as trustworthy, legitimate, and entitled to lead. Third, we outline how justice perceptions relate to protest intentions and behavior. Whereas perceived social injustice provides a strong motivation to participate in political protest, we also address the question of why people frequently fail to protest against sources of disadvantage and deprivation. In the final part of the chapter, we suggest avenues for future research.

Mutual long-term effects of school bullying, victimization, and justice sensitivity in adolescents.

In the present study, we investigate long-term relations between experiences of aggression at school and the development of justice sensitivity as a personality disposition in adolescents. We assessed justice sensitivity (from the victim, observer, and perpetrator perspective), bullying, and victimization among 565 German 12- to 18-year-olds in a one-year longitudinal study with two measurement points. Latent path analyses revealed gender differences in long-term effects of bullying and victimization on observer sensitivity and victim sensitivity. Experiences of victimization at T1 predicted an increase in victim sensitivity among girls and a decrease in victim sensitivity among boys. Bullying behavior at T1 predicted an increase in victim sensitivity among boys and a decrease in observer sensitivity among girls. We did not find long-term effects of justice sensitivity on bullying and victimization. Our findings indicate that experiences of bullying and victimization have gender-specific influences on the development of moral personality dispositions in adolescents.