“Imaginative contagion and moral corruption” - Alex Fisher (University of Leeds)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Early View)

By Alex Fisher

Have you ever played a videogame, read a book, or watched a TV show, and found you couldn’t stop thinking in similar ways afterwards?

Actors often describe how aspects of their character start to seep into their daily lives as they get “stuck” in a role, experiencing “boundary blurring” or “character bleed”. Allen, a junior theatre major, admits:

You forget who you are sometimes. You start intermingling with this character and you lose yourself and you start doing things. […] I played a character who had a certain walk [and] I would walk around [that way] onstage. And I would be walking around [campus] and be doing the same thing. I would realize I'm doing that and having this bad attitude that this character has about everything I'm seeing. I think, “Whoa, I don't know if this has gone too far or not.” (Burgoyne, Poulin, and Rearden 1999, 162)

In The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, Isaac Butler reports experiencing similar as a budding actor in New York:

After performances, I would stare at a wall in my dorm room for hours trying to come back to normal. […] I hated the person I became during rehearsal as the nastiness of the character bled into my own personality, and I was not tough enough to manage the emotions my performance dug into. (Butler 2022, 15)

A similar phenomenon has been observed amongst virtual reality users. The “Proteus Effect” describes how individuals’ behaviour and attitudes conform to those of the avatar they play as (Yee and Bailenson 2007; 2009).

Videogame players (myself included) likewise report finding themselves retaining ways of thinking, impulses, and expectations that they took on within the imaginative context of the videogame. (See Ortiz De Gortari et al. 2011; 2014; 2015a; 2015b on “game transfer phenomena”, such as the so-called “Tetris Effect”).

In these cases, we find ourselves actually feeling what we initially only imagined feeling, coming to think in ways we only imagined thinking, or even acquiring morally questionable character traits we imagined taking on. We experience what Tamar Szabó Gendler (2006) has called “imaginative contagion”.

Two philosophical questions:

1. How does imaginative contagion occur?

2. Does its prevalence legitimise the common concern that engagement with certain media and practices (e.g. violent videogames, role play etc.) might harm our moral sensibilities?

I try to answer each in my article “Imaginative contagion and moral corruption” (Philosophical and Phenomenological Research).

Regarding (1), I argue that there are two kinds of imaginative contagion. Immediate contagion occurs when imaginative mental states persist immediately after pretence, which can be explained by a failure in our usual ability to quarantine imagined mental states once we conclude an episode of pretence. Delayed contagion occurs when pretenders find imagined attitudes seeping into their everyday lives long after imaginative episodes. I explain these cases in terms of habit. Repeatedly adopting certain attitudes and perspectives in pretence can lead to their becoming mentally habituated, just as a tennis player might physically hone their serving technique through pretend rehearsal in the mirror.

Interactive and immersive contexts like acting, or role-playing in videogames and virtual reality, offer the perfect conditions for both of these forms of contagion to occur because they blur the line between imaginatively and actually adopting attitudes, which renders them liable to persist following imagination or become habituated. This is why imaginative contagion is especially associated with these contexts – though people do report experiencing contagion to a lesser extent after reading novels or watching TV shows too.

Regarding (2) – the concern that imaginative contagion might corrupt – I argue that the phenomenon of imaginative resistance comprises a natural barrier to more pernicious cases of contagion, as we resist imaginatively adopting some immoral attitudes and perspectives hence they cannot be acquired. In other contexts, however, we do imaginatively adopt problematic attitudes but passively quarantine them. I draw from research in dramatherapy and theatre studies on “de-roling” to suggest that we can further bolster this passive capacity through various practices of active quarantine, where we structure imaginative episodes in such a way as to prevent contagion occurring.

Imaginative resistance and quarantine together prevent contagion of the most worrying attitudes we imaginatively adopt. This aligns with the evidence telling us that players of violent videogames do not come to acquire the more extreme attitudes they imaginatively take on.[1] The more immoral we consider the attitude, the more these processes prevent its being acquired through contagion. Less obviously immoral mental states are more liable to contagion, however, as in the phenomenon of “aggressive cognition”[2] where players think and behave slightly more aggressively after playing violent videogames, or in cases of morally innocent (or even beneficial) game transfer phenomena (Ortiz De Gortari et al. 2011; 2014; 2015a; 2015b).

So while there is clearly significant value (epistemic, aesthetic, moral etc.) to be had in adopting alternative attitudes and perspectives in imagination, we perhaps ought to be more conscientious about how we do so, and how this might affect us, for imagination is often not as well-insulated as we might like to think.

References

American Psychological Association. 2015. ‘APA Review Confirms Link between Playing Violent Video Games and Aggression’. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/08/violent-video-games.

American Psychological Association. 2020. ‘APA Reaffirms Position on Violent Video Games and Violent Behavior’. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2020/03/violent-video-games-behavior.

Anderson, Craig A., and Karen E. Dill. 2000. ‘Video Games and Aggressive Thoughts, Feelings, and Behavior in the Laboratory and in Life’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78 (4): 772–90. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.78.4.772.

Burgoyne, Suzanne, Karen Poulin, and Ashley Rearden. 1999. ‘The Impact of Acting on Student Actors: Boundary Blurring, Growth, and Emotional Distress’. Theatre Topics 9 (2): 157–79. https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.1999.0011.

Butler, Isaac. 2022. The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Gendler, Tamar Szabó. 2006. ‘Imaginative Contagion’. Metaphilosophy 37 (2): 183–203. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9973.2006.00430.x.

Ortiz De Gortari, Angelica B., Karin Aronsson, and Mark Griffiths. 2011. ‘Game Transfer Phenomena in Video Game Playing: A Qualitative Interview Study’. International Journal of Cyber Behavior, Psychology and Learning (IJCBPL) 1 (3): 15–33. https://www.igi-global.com/article/game-transfer-phenomena-video-game/58041.

Ortiz De Gortari, Angelica B., and Mark D. Griffiths. 2014. ‘Automatic Mental Processes, Automatic Actions and Behaviours in Game Transfer Phenomena: An Empirical Self-Report Study Using Online Forum Data’. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction 12 (4): 432–52. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-014-9476-3.

Ortiz De Gortari, Angelica B., and Mark D. Griffiths. 2015. ‘Game Transfer Phenomena and Its Associated Factors: An Exploratory Empirical Online Survey Study’. Computers in Human Behavior 51: 195–202. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563215003568.

Ortiz De Gortari, Angelica B., Halley M. Pontes, and Mark D. Griffiths. 2015. ‘The Game Transfer Phenomena Scale: An Instrument for Investigating the Nonvolitional Effects of Video Game Playing’. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 18 (10): 588–94. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2015.0221.

Yee, Nick, and Jeremy N. Bailenson. 2007. ‘The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior’. Human Communication Research 33 (3): 271–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.2007.00299.x.

Yee, Nick, and Jeremy N. Bailenson. 2009. ‘The Difference Between Being and Seeing: The Relative Contribution of Self-Perception and Priming to Behavioral Changes via Digital Self-Representation’. Media Psychology 12 (2): 195–209. https://doi.org/10.1080/15213260902849943.

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[1] The scientific literature on violence and videogames is extensive, but frustratingly inconclusive at times. However, there is no evidence that players come away from violent videogames having acquired desires to go and actually murder people. (Not a huge surprise!). See American Psychological Association (2015) and (2020) for its public releases on this research.

[2] See Anderson & Dill (2000) and American Psychological Association (2020).