Socio-Psychological Perspectives on the Potential for Serious Games to Promote Transcendental Values in IWRM Decision-Making

This paper, a 2018 review published in Water, argues that serious games designed for integrated water resource management (IWRM) should aim to cultivate transcendental values, meaning motivations that extend beyond self-interest to social equity, intergenerational fairness, and environmental sustainability. Its central thesis is that IWRM decisions demand stakeholders who can weigh collective and future-oriented goals, and that serious games could serve as a vehicle for fostering these orientations. The authors ground this claim in social psychology, drawing on Schwartz's Theory of Basic Human Values, which identifies ten cross-culturally validated values organized on a circular continuum and confirmed across 82 countries. The paper distinguishes "value" in its strict socio-psychological sense from attitudes, preferences, and the monetary valuation common in economics.

The analysis finds that universalism and benevolence, the self-transcendence values that together form the "transcendental" category, align most closely with IWRM's equity goals across space and time. However, the authors emphasize that values are largely emotion-driven and resistant to direct persuasion, and that intergroup conflict, differences in empathy, and moral disengagement impose psychological limits on their adoption. Value change can nonetheless be influenced by social context, primers, emotional triggers, and prestige cues.

Drawing on these insights, the paper proposes preliminary design recommendations for "hybrid" serious games that combine scenarios forcing trade-offs between competing values with emotionally salient, cooperative gameplay, supported by reflection time and debriefing. These recommendations are presented as untested. The authors acknowledge that empirical evidence that serious games change values or real-world behavior remains limited, noting interview evidence that players often fail to transfer lessons to policy, and they advocate pre- and post-testing with the Schwartz Value Survey to measure outcomes.