Playing with the enemy: Competition, cooperation, and social disidentification

Playing a video game competitively or cooperatively may impact a player's behaviors and aggression after game play. Competition has been found to elicit increased aggression, and cooperation has been found to attenuate aggression and facilitate cooperative behaviors. However, the distinction between pure competition and team competition has been relatively unexplored. Team competition contains both competitive elements of game play and cooperative behaviors among teammates. Of interest is the effect of playing in varying degrees of team competition (high vs. low social disidentification with the outgroup) and pure competition on feelings of aggression and cooperative behaviors. A between-subjects experiment (N = 70) was conducted to examine the relationship among low disidentification, high disidentification, and pure competition for state hostility, affiliation, and cooperative behaviors. It was predicted that those in the low disidentification conditions would experience significantly lower hostility, but greater affiliation both for ingroup and outgroup members. Compared to pure competition and high disidentification, low disidentification resulted in significantly greater feelings of aggression. However, no level of disidentification or outcome affected cooperative behaviors after game play, as measured by a modified Prisoner's Dilemma task. The implications of the findings are discussed.