Not to start a discussion with “back in my day…” but back in my day Dungeons & Dragons players took a bit more of a risk to their social status when playing the game. D&D players were often seen as funky smelling nerds and weirdos who lacked the social graces to participate in more mainstream activities. Like playing sports or watching sports or talking about sports. Stereotypical D&D players were described as shy basement dwellers who struggled to speak up around other people and would always feel out of place in group activities that weren’t mediated by dice rolls. It’s an image that permeated popular culture for some time. It didn’t matter whether or not the stereotype was accurate; it was what was assumed.

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Over the years, that concept changed little by little until today D&D is seen as much more mainstream and celebrated. The game itself has evolved over its editions to emphasize more social and improvisational elements such as role-play, character building, and storytelling. Sure, many people still play it more like a war game than an improv show, but the game and its play base have changed enough to call into question the question of whether its players, taken as a group, have no charisma. (If I were a hip teen, I might have said “have no riz” but I’m not so I didn’t. You can’t prove otherwise.)

I recently came across an article in Frontiers in Psychology that attempts to empirically test the idea that the opposite of this old stereotypes are true. (Lorenz, Hagitte, and Brandt, 2022). What if D&D players are actually more charismatic and more open to a broad range of experiences than the general public? To do this, the researchers gathered a sample of over 800 people –half were D&D players and the other half were not– and measured several of their personality traits.

They were particularly interested in three traits from the “Big 5” model of personality:

• Extraversion / Introversion – How outgoing you are and how much you get energized by interacting with other people
• Openness to Experience – How open you are to experiencing new things and how inventive you tend to be
• Neuroticism (often called Emotional Stability) – How well you emotionally deal with stress and how mentally resilient you are

In addition to administering a personality assessment to subjects, the researchers also asked the half that were gamers about how charismatic their D&D characters are, on average, and what type of characters they liked to play.

The results were interesting and argued against the idea that today’s average D&D player is a socially awkward dork. Specifically, the researchers found that relative to non-players, D&D players were both more extraverted and more open to new experiences. On average, they enjoyed social interactions and novelty more than their non-gamer peers. Additionally, D&D players were no more or less neurotic than non-players, further evidence that they did not suffer a deficit of emotional stability.

Another interesting finding was that based on what D&D players reported about their typical player character, there was a significant correlation between a player’s score on the extraversion scale of the personality test and how many points they typically put into their characters’ charisma scores. Charisma, you’ll remember, is a game statistic meant to represent how effectively the character can interact with other people.

This was an interesting study to me because it puts the lie to old misconceptions about D&D players as being shut-ins who would rather slay an imaginary dragon than go to a party. Some thoughtful readers are likely to point out that “correlation doesn’t mean causation,” and while that’s generally a great mantra, it actually misses the point in this case. I don’t think the authors are trying to make the argument that playing D&D necessarily makes you more extraverted.The point IS that people are likely self-selecting into D&D as a hobby because they are more outgoing, creative, and open to new experiences.  It’s just that the game has evolved into an experience that can encourage and reward those kinds of tendencies.

REFERENCES

Lorenz, T., Hagitte, L., & Brandt, M. (2022). Do not make me roll initiative: Assessing the Big Five characteristics of Dungeons & Dragons players in comparison to non-players. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 1010800. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1010800