The following is an excerpt of the intervention methodology. For more information, please see the full text of the article on the publisher's website or through your institution's library.

The Current Study

The goal of the current study was to examine whether cooperating with an outgroup member in a violent video game reduces prejudice toward that outgroup. [...].

Method

Participants Participants consisted of 154 Canadian undergraduate students at Brock University (Ontario, Canada). Sixteen suspicious participants were excluded from analyses, leaving 138 participants (56% female; M age 18 years 9 months, SD 2 years 8 months).

Materials

Video games and equipment. The “Cooperative Zombie” mode of the violent first-person shooter game Call of Duty: Black Ops, in which players work together to shoot and kill zombies, [...]. [...].

Demographics. A demographic questionnaire assessed age, sex, and experience with first-person shooter games on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 5 (5 or more hours per day).

Prejudice. Attitudes toward University of Buffalo students (university outgroup) and toward Americans (national outgroup) were assessed both pregame and postgame using attitude thermometers. [...]. Pretest attitudes were assessed with a visual-analogue scale, where participants indicated their attitude with a mark on a 10-cm line anchored from extremely unfavorable to extremely favorable. Posttest attitudes were assessed on numbered Likert-Type 10-point thermometer scales, with responses ranging from 0 (0 –10 degrees extremely unfavorable) to 9 (90 –100 degrees extremely favorable). [...].

Categorization as one team. After playing the video game, participants rated the extent to which they felt like they and their partner “were one team playing the game” on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 7 [...]. [...].

Discrimination. To assess discriminatory behavior, participants were asked to select a video for their partner (ingroup or outgroup partner depending on condition) to watch, which allegedly elicits positive (happy/pleasant; coded as 1), neutral (control group; coded as 0), or negative (sad/unpleasant; coded as 1) emotions. [...].

Procedure Two students participated together in different rooms and were told that they were in a study examining the relationship between personality and video game play. [...]. In the intergroup condition participants were allegedly cooperating online with an American participant at the University of Buffalo (US), [...]. In reality the participant was an ingroup (Brock) university student, playing in an adjacent room. In the intragroup condition, participants were allegedly (and actually) cooperating with a Brock (ingroup) university student in an adjacent room. [...]. Participants completed a demographic questionnaire and pretest intergroup attitude measure before playing the shooter game for 12 minutes. Afterward, participants rated the extent to which they categorized themselves and their partner as one team, and completed posttest attitude measures. Finally participants completed a behavioral discrimination measure (allocating negative, neutral, or positive video viewing experiences), before completing a suspicion questionnaire and debriefing. [...].