Concluding, misunderstandings between psychologists and economists are, for the most part, caused by both parties failing to realize that, although the methodology is much the same, the goals and the research questions often differ on essential points. Psychologists want to understand the processes underlying human behavior and focus on theories that are essentially true but with a limited scope. Economists are interested in the relations between institutions and behavior, and consider a theory to be an approximation that will not always be completely true but often close. Bounded rationality and social preferences are only included in models when necessary to improve predictions considerably. In order to know in what kind of situations we can expect a specific behavior to have an impact, we need to understand the processes behind that behavior. Differences in experimental methodology are not the main problem; in marketing science (also a very experimental-oriented field) economists and psychologists apparently can work together well.
Games are making their way into the workplace through applications of “gamification” that treat work activities as games in order to make employees more satisfied, productive, and happy. All of these serious games’ applications work because of the same psychology and quirks of human nature that are in play in the video games that are played as entertainment. We should understand that psychology will also help you not only when you play but also when you shop, learn, work, and engage in the political process. It will also help you understand why you engage with products and services that rely on the same psychological tricks, such as Twitter, Pinterest, email, message boards, Facebook, and any other social media platform. Applying the psychology of games to other software products is more of an inferential hop than a leap. This is one of the reasons why academic interest in video games has risen alongside sales records. Like those who play them just for fun, many of today’s brightest scholars grew up with video games, and they want to study what interests them and what they see as the most important medium of their age. As a result, many of these academics are donning their lab jackets, grabbing a clipboard, and advancing the fields of sociology, economics, and communications through research involving video games and virtual worlds. Psychology, the study of mental processes and behavior, has been a particularly productive field for understanding video games and the people who play them. Not too many years ago it would have seemed absurd to see scientific, peer-reviewed publications like the Journal For Virtual Worlds Research, Games and Culture, Computers in Human Behavior, International Journal of Human-Computer Psychology, and Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. And yet here they are: real, physical publications that you can hold, read, and smack people around with. Even august, well-established journals like the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Psychological Bulletin frequently publish research on virtual worlds and video games. And though many of these scientists happily do their work at universities, more than a few have also been scooped up by video game development companies to do research from inside the industry and use their insights on the psychology of video games. As we will see later in this book, if you’ve played a game developed by Valve, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, Riot Games, Microsoft, or many others, you’ve benefited from this research and enjoyed something that a psychologist has helped make better.
The interests and methods of social psychologists and economists overlap, but the emphasis is different. Social psychologists focus on the processes underlying behavior, while economists focus on the interaction between institutions and behavior. Of course, this difference may not be that clear-cut, with some researchers located somewhere at the border.
