As a lifelong gamer, this is not even remotely surprising:
Here’s a research finding that should surprise no one: The men most likely to harass women online … are the men most likely to have their own problems.
That bit of validation comes courtesy Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff, researchers at the University of New South Wales and Miami University, respectively. For their latest study, published in the journal PLOS One last week, the duo watched how men treated women during 163 plays of the video game Halo 3.
As they watched the games play out and tracked the comments that players made to each other, the researchers observed that — no matter their skill level, or how the game went — men tended to be pretty cordial to each other. Male players who were good at the game also tended to pay compliments to other male and female players.
Some male players, however — the ones who were less-skilled at the game, and performing worse relative their peers — made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are literally losers.
***In each of these environments, Kasumovic suggests, a recent influx of female participants has disrupted a pre-existing social hierarchy. That’s okay for the guys at the top — but for the guys at the bottom, who stand to lose more status, that’s very threatening. (It’s also in keeping with the evolutionary framework on anti-lady hostility, which suggests sexism is a kind of Neanderthal defense mechanism for low-status, non-dominant men trying to maintain a shaky grip on their particular cave’s supply of women.)
“As men often rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status,” Kasumovic writes, “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.”
Losers are losers- hoocoodanode.
rikyrah
This is water is wet news.
gussie
Maybe we can convince these jerkholes to try to use ‘possing’ to show women that they’re winners.
Kropadope
Wow, spot on, particularly:
Though I perform poorly on some games and don’t lash out at women or anyone else (unless maybe they’re doing something unsporting). Not sure if that’s because there are many other games that I am good at or that I’m gay.
@gussie: Possing?
Brachiator
@rikyrah: I’m not a game player, but I find this kind of stuff interesting.
This is mildly surprising. I would have thought there would have been more competitive horseplay and more jibes at other players, even at this level.
The rest of the study,and the hostility towards women is sad and not surprising at all.
On the other hand, this:
This is just stupid word salad pretending to be science. This has got to be from the reporter writing the piece since I can’t imagine it being the quote of any of the researchers (I hope). One clue as to the stupidity of this is the very out of date reference to Neanderthal as a metaphor for brutishness, as well as the dumbass notion of a cave’s supply of women.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I suspect the only reason this doesn’t also apply to race is that it’s even harder to determine someone’s race in an online game than it is to determine their gender. There’s a reason people like the South Carolina murderer aren’t exactly successful paragons of their own racial group.
Roger Moore
I hate this crap. Evolutionary psychology is 99% just-so stories with at best tenuous relationships to reality. The little we know suggests that hunter-gatherer societies (like Neanderthals) tend to be relatively egalitarian. Men dominating women and trying to control as many of them as possible is something that started with agriculture, because that’s what created societies where the haves were capable of hoarding enough resources to support more than one family. Claiming that sexism has deep evolutionary roots going back to the cavemen is just a bunch of bullshit.
Mandalay
@Brachiator:
Yep, it was worthless, meaningless swill concocted by the WP’s “digital culture critic”.
Drivel of the highest order.
shell
Bless you, Cole, for putting up a post that is NOT about Donald Trump.
Joey Giraud
Clearly the solution is to give those losers a badge, a gun and a tazer.
RK
This sort of dynamic can almost certainly be found in any environment with all types of participants. Lower group members are going to have some sort of resentment against someone or something. In fact, that you would call these people losers is itself a reflection of such negative group status dynamics. Of course, there are just as ugly behaviors at other positions on the ladder including the top.
BGinCHI
This never happens during Sim City.
John Cole
Yeah, pretty sure the part in quotes is an actual quote and the rest of the piece is her writing.
Punctuation marks. WTF ARE THEY?
boatboy_srq
@Brachiator:
IOW racist and sexist in one pass.
boatboy_srq
@John Cole: Punctuation is an archaic artifact of pre-Twitter society.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@RK:
I think you may have missed part of the point — because these players tend to be less skilled (less good at the game), they try to maintain their status within the group by trying to drive off better players. Calling them “losers” is at least somewhat literal since they often lose the game to others.
Kropadope
@Brachiator:
I think for the sake of this particular case, that the jocular name-calling could still be viewed as a form of being cordial.
The only time I ever had to deal with angry people online on a regular basis is when I was on a losing team with a particular friend. He would demand I play a certain way, but even if that were precisely what I was doing or had a reason to do otherwise, he would still yell. Just frustration for losing.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I guess the real “water is wet” story here is Insecure People Are Insecure. Who knew?
Kropadope
@boatboy_srq:
Funny concept to think about.
Kropadope
@Joey Giraud:
Couldn’t hurt, clearly these people have no aim or reflexes anyway.
boatboy_srq
@Kropadope: Indeed…
OnkelFritze
Okay JC, now what is your skill level as a gamer?
RK
Just to clarify: Negative evolutionary behavior is not limited to the lower end of a social class and calling these people losers, or using that term in any regard, reflects this.
Kropadope
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Sometimes you can, accents or other cultural clues can travel by voice or screennames can given an indication. Still, racist and homophobic comments fly at random anyway.
elftx
Same thing in online cards as in (p)oker..not so skilled players can be over the top rude. They are usually pretty aggressive in their play as well so sometimes their winning a pot also brought a round of bragging which never ended.
This is why I purposely kept my online name fairly neutral. Most assume I am a male. And the phrase “don’t tap the glass” applies.
John Cole
@OnkelFritze: Depends on the game.
aimai
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): But it does apply to race in the real world–as in unions or other formerly white areas that desegregate. An influx of competitors into a previously established hierarchy doesn’t threaten the guys at the top as much as it does the ones at the bottom (with fewer skills, less seniority) etc… And you can also see, in the real world, why lower status players/lower status workers can, where necessary, groom or be cordial and complimentary to upper status players/workers while fiercly competing and being agressive to new-same status or new competition. Because you can get help and make alliances upwards (and people above you can sometimes pull you up) but people at your level are just competing with you.
schrodinger's cat
Why do we care about the habits of overgrown man-children. Is there nothing else to discuss besides that and Trump.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
I don’t think we know this to be the case. And I don’t think we know anything at all about Neandertal societies, or much about any early human societies to do more than speculate about relations between men and women.
This is doubtful, too. And farming is very recent, maybe 12,000 years in the oldest societies, more recent elsewhere.
Ken
There’s correlation, but is there causation? And if so, which comes first – I would guess that not playing well leads to anger and lashing out, but maybe the hothead personality just doesn’t play as well?
schrodinger's cat
@aimai: This is true in the context of the Indian caste system too. The most brutal oppressors of the lowest castes (untouchables) are the castes directly above them, what in Indian bureaucratese are known as OBCs (other backward castes).
aimai
@schrodinger’s cat: Absolutely. And in class relations. Where there is no such thing as a real working class culture (and even where there is) the working class is very easily pitted against immigrants, non-whites, other ethnic groups and the middle class pitted (as we see every day in the Republican party) against the poor and working class instead of against the rich.
Punchy
Can they go back and attempt to establish a inverse proportionality between their gaming skill and the number of dates they have per month? How about gaming skill with acne? Perhaps gaming acumen and the number of yards ran before heat exhaustion sets in?
In other likewise surprising news, the sun sets in the west and the White Sox suck ass.
Kropadope
@Punchy:
Well, I’m awesome at video games, but I’m going to be running for the better part of a 3 hour hockey game tonight.
RK
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I don’t think Cole was using the term literally and while the study seemed to show less capable gamers attacking women only–which would seem to be attributable to tribalism as well–no strata level is immune to, or above, “negative” evolutionary behavior. Put those friendly top gamers in a group where they’re the less capable and I suspect you’ll find them embracing a different attitude.
slag
This explains why Adam Baldwin is such a leader in the men-harassing-women community. It’s the only crew in which his leadership skills are actually appreciated.
No way Mal would stoop to this shit.
FlyingToaster
@RK: Not necessarily. I’ve watched the elite gamers back when I did my time at the CGDC/GDC, and winning or losing, the best players simply don’t want to waste their time on being angry. The jibes were there, but mostly as immediate relief of frustration. And they weren’t giving additional shit to anyone; newcomers, women, what-have-you.
From working in a so-called “man’s profession”, in my experience it’s the lower status men who have never caught a break that seem to always have a problem with any kind of competition at all. The lower status men who are socially better adjusted aren’t spending all of their time worrying about what someone else is doing.
EthylEster
Even the tone of the WaPo article makes my skin crawl.
Remember when WaPo hired actual journalists who had actual experience writing for quality papers? This is just sad, the writing in the article, I mean, not its substance…it has no substance…crap pseudo-science.
Origuy
PZ Myers wrote about this, and linked to the original paper. Much of the evo-psych is in there too, and he’s not happy about it.
EthylEster
@schrodinger’s ca asked:
Um, Trump IS an overgrown man-child.
DemJayhawks
@John Cole: Post your WN8 tank man, or we’ll just assume you’re a tomato. ;-)
schrodinger's cat
@EthylEster: Point taken, you are right, of course.
RSA
This finding may well be true, but I think the argument needs to be a little bit more convincing. That line plot in the WP article? It’s taken directly from the paper. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything quite like that in a quantitative paper. Fortunately, the authors give us their data and analysis procedures.
Origuy
@schrodinger’s cat:
Aside from the abuse directed at female and minority gamers, computer gaming is a multi-billion dollar business. One group of its customers driving away other customers is bad for business.
sm*t cl*de
The original sodding paper was stupid word salad pretending to be science. It was execrable in at least 5 different ways (I gave up counting) but it told people what they thought they already know so it’s getting a lot of coverage on the Intertubes.
The authors put more work into writing clickbait press releases and making life easy for the churnalists than they put into the study itself.
Origuy
OT: Working at home today. I live in a townhouse complex and my window looks out onto the main road in. There are at least five SJPD cars parked there now and they’ve just brought out a German Shepherd.
And now someone’s getting perp walked. I didn’t hear any yelling or shots fired.
Brachiator
@Origuy:
Crap. The problem is not in the testing methodology, but in the scientists’ basic assumptions:
from the abstract:
So, loser jerks can’t help it. The blind watchmaker of evolution made them this way. How tiresome.
FlipYrWhig
@sm*t cl*de: This. The way the research tells me something that matches up _so_ well with what I already would have thought… that’s the kind of thing that tends to give me pause.
LWA
This explains a whole lot wrt race and the working class whites.
Linnaeus
@Brachiator:
Quoted in your comment:
I’m curious as to their reasoning behind this statement.
FlipYrWhig
@Linnaeus: “Because evolution.”
ruemara
The conclusion to this article, with the cutesy recommendation that women should stick to Pinterest, needs to fuck off and die in a fire-pronto.
singfoom
@schrodinger’s cat:There are plenty of us gamers that are actual adults that are not “overgrown man-children”. It’s a billion dollar a year+ industry and a large part of popular culture.
Also it seems like the guy who runs this blog is into it.
Linnaeus
@FlipYrWhig:
Yes – awfully convenient, isn’t it? I’m not a sociologist, anthropologist, or social psychologist, but their leap to an “evolutionary” explanation appears to rely on an interpretation of social constructivist theory that isn’t very nuanced.
Mike J
@FlipYrWhig: The data looks fine at first glance. Men who are worse at games tend to make more negative comments about women. It’s only the conclusions they draw from that data that look arguable.
If you refuse to believe any research that agrees with common sense, you’ll end up writing for Slate. Nobody wants that.
sm*t cl*de
The authors are evolutionary psychologists. They have evolved to make stupid assumptions and force their data into predetermined conclusions; they have no choice in the matter. Their reproductive fitness depends on it.
One thing missing in the paper itself was any evidence that the Halo forum had recently experienced a recent influx of female participants.
White Trash Liberal
That’s just Halo. They need to apply the same year and criterion to other network games. Then compare behavior. They need to rule out factors inherent to the gameplay, such as violence, avatar hypermasculine/feminity, actual game mechanics, etc. Plus there are other documented gamer subcultures like griefing that should be studied.
This paper is barely a rough draft and plants way too many suppositions and enthymemes which can be explained by other factors.
Kropadope
Aren’t the avatars pretty desexualized in Halo? They used to be completely, but now there are girl versions that are shaped slightly different and make different noises.
Pogonip
Aren’t these the games where everyone plays on his own computer from his own house? So how do you know the sex of the other players? If Bruce gets on as Caitlyn (don’t know why I picked those two names for my example), or vice versa, who’s to know? Or if John Cole gets on as Pogonip, how does anyone know Pogonip’s sex? I can see where the losers are insulting female names, but what if Emily is really a football player named Matt chuckling at how he’s fooled those doofuses ( doofi?) into thinking he’s a chick? And what if the losers suspect Emily’s really Matt and the insults are an attempt to smoke him out? I don’t get what this is supposed to prove other than that you don’t know who’s whom on the Internet.
Kropadope
@Pogonip: Microphones.
slag
@Mike J: What you said.
Brachiator
@Linnaeus: Let’s see, now. From the study.
High status men act nice to get women; low status men act mean because they can’t get women.
Pogonip
@Kropadope: What about them?
I can beat Bruce, Caitlyn, Matt, Emily AND John G. Cole at computer mah jong. So there.
Kropadope
@Pogonip: People speak on microphones while they’re playing and that provides other players with the information to identify gender and often cultural background.
In addition to mics being useful for trading strategic info like “I’m going down the hallway, get my back,” they are also the medium upon which the low-skilled players are insulting other players.
Pogonip
@Kropadope: Oh, thank you! NOW it makes more sense.
Kropadope
@Pogonip: My apologies, seemed obvious to me, though might not be to a non-gamer.
Roger Moore
@Mike J:
Their figures look suspiciously pretty at first glance. Real data never gives curves that beautiful, even if you apply smoothing, and the raw data- which you can download- doesn’t look very much like their figures. That data has been massaged to within an inch of its life.
RK
@FlyingToaster:I’m not sure you got what I was saying (or maybe I missed yours) but being kind and gracious is easy when you’re on top and no threats are posed. As to being better adjusted, (a thorny subject in my view) it may reduce negative behavior but not the feelings that loss and lower status give rise to.
Anne Laurie
“Resource guarding” is a hellauva bad habit to un-learn. When our rescue dog Gloria came to live with us, she’d steal tea bags and Dial soap wrappers out of the trash, and bite anyone who tried to take them away… or even someone who offered to trade them for something actually edible, like a biscuit. (After four years of being fed well on a predictable schedule, she still steals & hoards the soap wrappers, but at least she doesn’t try to eat them any more.)
Male gamers who perceive themselves as low-status will turn mean if anyone tries to take away the “scraps” of their perceived dignity — even when shutting up about their misogyny might give them a rare, precious chance to interact favorably with actual women. It’s the rare and lucky Luzer among these guys who get another human interested enough to help them un-learn all that negative conditioning. (And it’s no picnic for their partners, either!)
Tone In DC
@Joey Giraud:
That is gonna leave a mark.
Speaking of homicidal/crazed/violent cops… at least two of these should be off the streets, now.
http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Ex-Police-Officer-Found-Guilty-Involuntary-Manslaughter-188842921.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/found-guilty-assaulting-handcuffed-woman-article-1.2248417
Brachiator
@Origuy
RE: PZ Myers wrote about this, and linked to the original paper. Much of the evo-psych is in there too, and he’s not happy about it.
Here’s another interesting little wrinkle in the world of gaming from the same site.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/07/21/its-good-to-have-your-identity-shaken-up-now-and-then/#comments
Brachiator
A prior version of this got moderated. Let’s try again
@Origuy
RE: PZ Myers wrote about this, and linked to the original paper. Much of the evo-psych is in there too, and he’s not happy about it.
Here’s another interesting little wrinkle in the world of gaming from the same site.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/07/21/its-good-to-have-your-identity-shaken-up-now-and-then/#comments
White Trash Liberal
@Kropadope:
They are. I was rattling off factors that, IMO can influence behavior. Turn based and real time strategy has a different game culture than Halo. I was a StarCraft nerd (Zerg!!) and meanness was a tiny piece of the trash talk.
I want to apologize for my behavior yesterday towards you. I got frustrated and regret much of what I said. It’s too easy to get caught up in this culture and forget ourselves in the moment of Being Correct. I did that and it was stupid.
Joel
I haven’t been good at anything resembling a competitive video game since the days of Hakeem Olajuwon’s insane NBA JAM ratings.
slag
@Roger Moore: As PZ Meyers said:
schrodinger's cat
Is evolutionary psychology the social Darwinism of today? Prejudice masquerading as pseudoscience.
FlyingToaster
@RK:
Granted it’s a thorny subject; it’s the best description I can think of for the observed behaviors.
This goes back a few years to both when I was playing Office Doom (yes, the 90’s, I’m old) after hours with the rest of the programming team, and later running playtests in my basement.
“Better adjusted” refers specifically to young men who don’t seem to succumb to Tourettes or berserkerism whenever anything goes wrong, or do so momentarily and then shake it off. I observed this in gameplay, and in round-robin module testing (where after completing portions of a program, each of us tested two other programmer’s work). You always knew who you didn’t want testing your work :)
Roger Moore
@slag:
Taking a second look, their figure titles actually say that the curves are for the predicted numbers, not for the actual data. Plotting fitted curves with nary a sign of raw data is still dirty pool in my book.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
Pretty much. And a number of conservative writers and pundits love evolutionary psychology, because it let’s them claim that the old biases they hold so dear are really deeply embedded into human nature.
Pogonip
@Kropadope: Non-gamer? Fie, sir! Mah jong’s a game!
That one that randomly assigns you a race and sex sounds fun, unless you end up as what you really are, which would be a bit of a letdown.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
Also let me rant a little more before I cut out for the day. Some scientists, even those who are not evolutionary psychologists commit a basic error or assuming that human society today in America is the norm, and then try to back fill its existence by misusing evolution. You see this often in garbage about sex and marriage, that assumes that Uncle Bert and Aunt Tillie in Minnesota somehow represents all of humanity.
The other, bigger problem is essentialist nonsense that asserts that we are basically hunter gatherers, and then makes broad assertions based on narrow evidence. But we spent millions of years as hunter gatherers, and during this time, humans expanded over the entire planet, evolved from small brained semi-bipedal apes to whatever we are now, branched off into various interbreeding species, and developed a wide range of ways of living and surviving. In short, the time that we were hunter gatherers (including a time when we were more opportunistic scavengers) was much more varied and dynamic than some scientists seem to be able to understand.
A guy
I can’t believe anybody would admit to be a life long gamer and engage in a twitter fight in the same year
Pogonip
@Brachiator: A couple of guys wrote a whole series of papers to the effect that the last 50 years of psychology experiments are mostly useless because the subjects were American college students and WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, small-d Democratic) people are very much non-representative of humanity at large.
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: Its not only these scientists, our MSM suffers from the same premise, that the world rotates around what the United States does. See for example the coverage of the deal with Iran.
Sm*t Cl*de
Turns out that the key claim made in the WashPost blurb (i.e. the claim that confirms everyone’s expectations) —
— is flatly contradicted by the paper itself:
Chris
Have you played Witcher 3 yet, Cole? You need to play Witcher 3.
Kropadope
@White Trash Liberal: Hey, no biggie. I probably said some dumb shit too.
Sherparick
No need to slander Neanderthals. Just a reminder that we basically just another ape/monkey, with the social mores of a baboon colony. http://lordoftheapes.blogspot.com/2009/12/what-do-baboons-got-that-chimpanzees.html
Related topic, True Detective 2 is getting panned as much as True Detective 1 was overly praised, but it redeemed itself for me with the scene of Ani attending mandatory sexual harassment training as part of her penance. That scene was perfect in episode 5.