ABSTRACT
Psychology, particularly the social psychological tradition and behaviorist approach, has contributed extensively to prominent empirical findings and conceptual frameworks informing their understanding of the social role of digital games. By approaching human behavior as the product of gradual molding by the process of natural selection to shape optimal responses to information presented by the environment, evolutionary psychology research adopts evolutionary biology as a broad conceptual structure to guide its predictions, empirical investigations, and interpretations of findings. Another more general opportunity for potentially problematic post hoc decisions in data analysis of video games research that can be easily fit to popular theoretical narratives from evolutionary psychology is sex differences. Open science practices provide an opportunity for such research to ward off arguments that its findings are based in flexible post hoc interpretation, solidifying the credibility of research that is sorely needed to integrate biological and social perspectives into an understanding of the psychology of digital games.
