Spent Game To Reduce Prejudice Towards The Poor-Roussos
#notesFromPaper Year : Tags : Spent list of civics games Authors: Roussos Dovidio
Media affects one’s lenses. Playing a black character beating up a white character increases negative attitudes toward black people.
There is a lot of stigma toward poverty. Games can help, but sometimes the autonomy and perspective taking of games actually increases stigma in people because they assume that impoverished people get given the same autonomy that they received in the game. An example of the backfire effect.
conducted a power analysis using G*power
created some personalized questions like “do you think poverty is personally controllable” and “how do you feel about service workers” and “how do you feel about establishing more soup kitchens”
they found that SPENT did not actually make people think poverty was more controllable.
used a bootstrapping model to see how much controllability beliefs and empathy affected final policy support.
Discussion
This study threw a lot of hypotheses out the window. While empathic concern increased, it didn’t affect final positive attitudes towards the poor as much as expected.
They expected that winning the game would lead to a higher belief in controllability, but it turns out winning lead to the opposite. Their hypothesis is that Spent’s real power comes from education about poverty, not empathy.
Interestingly, observing people playing Spent did what the authors expected, increasing empathy, policy support, concern, etc. tag: are games better than videos or books
Study 2
Does meritocracy beliefs affect how much Spent affected them?
Did a meritocracy scale, an empathy scale, and a “how do you feel about these groups (e.g. lawyers, clowns, drug addicts, black people)” test
Spent did not significantly affect attitudes towards the poor, and high meritocracy was affected even less.
Spent was about an outgroup with something ostensibly controllable (poverty is somewhat controllable), but maybe playing with an outgroup that isn’t controllable (e.g. a disability) might have different effects.
