A Dungeons & Dragons effect? Playing unfamiliar characters in role-playing games is associated with enhanced perspective taking.

In tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons, players act not as themselves but as a fictional character in a fantasy world. Often this involves making in-game choices based not on what the player would like to do but what the player believes the character would do, i.e. perspective taking. It has been speculated that role-playing might enhance the ability to understand others’ perspectives, but no rigorous quantitative work on the hypothesis has yet been conducted. In a survey of over 300 experienced TTRPG players, greater time spent role-playing characters that are markedly more different from one’s self was significantly associated with higher scores on the perspective-taking subscale of the Interpersonal reactivity Index. This association persisted even when a measure of autistic traits (the AQ) was included in the same model. These results suggest that there is value in future work investigating a potential causative role for TTRPG experience in enhancing perspective taking and add to the evidence that the ability to understand others’ mental states might be flexible even in adulthood.