Kill or Spare – Moral Decision-Making in Video Games

Video game titles with meaningful and morally relevant storylines are becoming increasingly popular and an intensely researched topic for entertainment scholars. Furthermore, virtual moral processing can contribute significantly to the understanding of human morality in general. In the current psychological laboratory experiment, N = 101 participants played four chapters of Detroit: Become Human for approx. 55 min featuring up to 13 moral decisions, which were presented either under time pressure or not. Before playing, participants were assigned to one of three conditions (playing a morally vs. immorally framed character vs. no framing/control condition). As expected, players generally preferred to act morally sound regardless of character framing. Time pressure further increased the proportion of moral (vs. immoral) decision-making. Our results underline that moral decision-making is dependent on specific contexts and that morality theories can be applied to virtual gaming scenarios.