Graph of the Week – Sexism and Skill in Online Gaming

In a recently published study, an evolutionary biologist has been using ideas from evolutionary psychology to try to explain why some men seem to have a hard time dealing with women outperforming them in a male-dominated environment, in this case, a popular multiplayer first person shooter.

The two major hypotheses considered are “male players should be relatively more negative and less positive towards a female (outgroup member) compared to a male-voiced teammate when encountered regardless of the focal player’s in-game performance or status” and “a male’s behaviour should be moderated by status and performance, such that only lower-status males that have the most to lose with a hierarchical reorganization by the introduction of a female competitor will be hostile towards female players.” These are said to be the “social constructionist and evolutionary explanations for sexist behaviour” respectively, although a few other realistic possibilities should spring to mind.

Several media outlets have covered the study so far:

[Credit to Corsair 115 of the ISF for rounding up those links.]

Almost all of the coverage I’ve seen is shallow and sensationalist, with ridiculous headlines like “Men who harass women online are quite literally losers” and “Sexist guys suck at video games, science says” or “The most sexist male gamers are usually also the least skilled.” All of these stories suffer from the usual problems of pop-science reporting identified by Elizier Yudkowsky:

The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news.

Probably the worst aspect of the media reporting on this study is that the many writers seem to believe that the study has shown us something about the relationship of player skill to hostile expressions of sexism, even though the study itself forthrightly says that it shows no such thing:

Of the 82 players in the female manipulation playing on the same team as the experimental player, only 11 individuals (13%) uttered hostile sexist statements. As a result of this small sample size, we only examined whether the presence of hostile sexist statements was affected by individual performance relative to the experimental player. We found that the presence of sexist statements was not determined by differences in maximum skill achieved (χ2 = 1.70, p = 0.19), the number of deaths (χ2 = 0.57, p = 0.45) or the number of kills (χ2 = 2.25, p = 0.13) relative to the experimental player.

In order to illustrate the distribution of sexist statements throughout the data set, I’ve whipped up a quick scatterplot based on the source data generously provided by Kasumovic and Kuznekoff.

At most, these data could be used to show a weak relationship between maximum player skill level and the amount of negative feedback being directed female-sounding players. No useful conclusions about the relationship of overt sexism to player skill can be drawn from the distribution of sexist remarks.

Even though the media summaries of this research have been generally misleading and irrationally overconfident about the conclusions being drawn, I do think that this sort of research is worth pursuing further. Certainly anonymous multiplayer gaming provides an avenue for human psychological research free from several of the usual constraints involved with gathering data from (typically undergraduate) volunteers.

Your thoughts?