Serious games are emerging as a new medium for social change. This study investigated the influence of presentation mode afforded by different media on willingness to help in the context of humanitarian aid. Two online experiments were conducted. The first experiment demonstrated that playing the Darfur is Dying game elicited greater role-taking and resulted in greater willingness to help the Darfurian people than reading a text conveying the same information. The second experiment deconstructed the variable presentation mode in more detail by adding a game watching condition. Similar results were found such that game playing resulted in greater role-taking and willingness to help than game watching and text reading. Implications for researchers and game developers are also discussed.
How well people bounce back from mistakes depends on their beliefs about learning and intelligence. For individuals with a growth mind-set, who believe intelligence develops through effort, mistakes are seen as opportunities to learn and improve. For individuals with a fixed mind-set, who believe intelligence is a stable characteristic, mistakes indicate lack of ability. We examined performance-monitoring event-related potentials (ERPs) to probe the neural mechanisms underlying these different reactions to mistakes. Findings revealed that a growth mind-set was associated with enhancement of the error positivity component (Pe), which reflects awareness of and allocation of attention to mistakes. More growth-minded individuals also showed superior accuracy after mistakes compared with individuals endorsing a more fixed mind-set. It is critical to note that Pe amplitude mediated the relationship between mind-set and posterror accuracy. These results suggest that neural mechanisms indexing on-line awareness of and attention to mistakes are intimately involved in growth-minded individuals' ability to rebound from mistakes.
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