Although researchers studied a game about shooting each other in the face, they said the game is very similar to the Internet as a whole: players are anonymous, there are enough players that the likelihood of you seeing someone you’re mean to is virtually nonexistent, and the player base is mostly men. News? Maybe not entirely-and I have some quibbles with the study itself, as always.
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For their latest study, published in the journal PLOS One, Kasumovic and Kuznekoff investigated the effect that losing has on the behaviour of men towards women. It’s a pretty small sample size. Thankfully, the study suggests that if we continue teaching boys and girls that they’re equal from an early age, then it might not be this way forever. Matches were divided into a control group-where the player was silent throughout-and two experimental groups where the researchers played the same set of inoffensive prerecorded statements (e.g., “Alright team let’s do this” or “That was a good game everyone”) in either a male or female voice.
The researchers conducting the study took note of both negative and positive comments and who they were directed at.
Halo 3 is a first-person shooter video game on Xbox 360 where the player is a cybernetically enhanced super soldier battling enemies known as the Covenant. By comparison, equally successful male players at the top of the tree were also positive and encouraging to their female teammates. This was not almost as much the case for male players.
Finally, I’m not entirely sure that this evidence supports the researchers’ conclusion-that this all occurs because sexism is an inherited quality, and that all this posturing is simply a result of ingrained urges to-ahem-engage in romance. Players with lower relative skill were more likely to make positive comments to the “male” than the “female”.
A key takeaway from the study is that the men who were harassing the women were said to be doing so because their participation upset the social hierarchy that had been established during the play sessions, and they therefore perceived themselves as the individuals most likely to suffer due to their poor performance. It’s something we can, and will, overcome as a society if we acknowledge it and bring those faulty ideas to light.
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“As men often rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status, the increase in hostility towards a woman by lower-status males may be an attempt to disregard a female’s performance and suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social rank”, Kasumovic told The Washington Post.
