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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steven Samuel" data-source="post: 9853499" data-attributes="member: 7054097">Thank you to all those who participated in my TTRPG study last year. The first main finding is now being considered for publication in a psychology journal. Results showed that gamers who play characters that they consider more different from themselves report greater perspective taking skills than people who play characters more similar to themselves. This makes sense in the context of the extra effort required to step into the shoes of a different personality, and suggests (but does not prove) that playing unfamiliar characters might enhance perspective taking in life more generally. The summary (abstract) is as follows:In tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons, players act not as themselves but as a fictional character in a fantasy world. Often this involves making in-game choices based not on what the player would like to do but what the player believes the character would do, i.e. perspective taking. It has been speculated that role-playing might enhance the ability to understand others’ perspectives, but no rigorous quantitative work on the hypothesis has yet been conducted. In a survey of over 300 experienced TTRPG players, greater time spent role-playing characters that are markedly more different from one’s self was significantly associated with higher scores on the perspective-taking subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. This association persisted even when a measure of autistic traits (the AQ) was included in the same model. These results suggest that there is value in future work investigating a potential causative role for TTRPG experience in enhancing perspective taking and add to the evidence that the ability to understand others’ mental states might be flexible even in adulthood.Anyone interested in reading the full article can find it here: <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/34r2b_v1" target="_blank">OSF</a>. I have a channel that discusses the psychology of RPGs and some other findings on YouTube: <a href="https://youtube.com/@rpgpsy" target="_blank">RPG Psychology</a>.I'm expecting another publication to come from the same study, this time relating to what attracts autistic people and people with greater autistic traits to TTRPGs.</blockquote>

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