Enter the Matrix: Does Self-Activation Really Matter for Aggressiveness After Violence Exposure?

Abstract

Media comparisons are only valid within "zones of comparability." Either the level of participants' interactivity (i.e., the "syntactics" of what they do) has to be constant, while the content might vary, or the content of specific media (i.e., the "semantics" of what they encounter) has to be kept constant, while the level of interactivity with the content might vary. The present experiment varied the level of interactivity: Participants watched a violent scene from the movie The Matrix or reenacted the same scene in a Matrix-inspired first-person shooter game. Using the same violent content (shooting at Matrix guards), our results suggest that the higher the level of self-activation while being exposed to violent media content, the stronger the changes in aggressive dispositions as assessed with an aggressive self-concept Implicit Association Test. Ruling out confounders from previous research, unspecific arousal was not responsible for the obtained short-term increases in aggressive dispositions.