Talk to women who play games online, especially first-person shooters, and you'll quickly hear tales of them being bombarded with gender-focused harassment if and when they decide to speak up on a groupchat channel. Now, a new study suggests that the players most likely to engage in this kind of harassment are the ones who are actually worst at the game itself.

In the study, published last week by the Public Library of Science, two researchers from the University of New South Wales and Miami University of Ohio looked at player reactions during 126 recorded matches of Halo 3 team deathmatch. 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.

For each experimental match, the researchers transcribed any responses to these prerecorded snippets from their teammates (all the responses came from male-identified voices—if there were any other women playing in these matches, they stayed silent). Those responses were then hand-coded into positive (e.g., "Do ya thing, girl"), negative (e.g. "Should've made me a sandwich, bitch"), and neutral (e.g., "You wanna jump in the jeep?") groups. The researchers also kept track of the responding players' overall Halo 3 skill ranking (as determined by Xbox Live) and game-specific metrics like kill/death ratio and whether the team won the game. These performance metrics were also compared against the experimental player to create a relative skill ranking.

Unsurprisingly, the results showed that the "female" players received more negative comments than the "male" players overall. Also unsurprisingly, players that had less relative skill could be expected to make fewer positive comments and more negative comments, overall. But players that were performing poorly were much more likely to make negative comments specifically toward "female" teammates, as well.

A player with zero kills in a match, for instance, could be expected to make five negative comments to a "female" player presented in the experiment, while a player with 25 kills would only be expected to make one negative comment to the "female" experimenter. For the "male" experimental player, there was no such correlation; they received an average of about two negative comments regardless of how many kills the other player had.

The results also applied on the other side of the equation. Players with higher relative skill rankings were more likely to make positive comments to the "female"-voiced experimenter than the "male"-voiced experimenter. Players with lower relative skill were more likely to make positive comments to the "male" than the "female." In fact, the number of positive comments a male player received barely budged as player skill changed.

The researchers suggest an evolutionary psychology explanation for these results, arguing that "low-status, low-performing males are hostile towards female competitors" while the higher-skilled males are not as threatened by the "disruption" in the established hierarchy. "Low-status males that have the most to lose due to a hierarchical reconfiguration are responding to the threat female competitors pose," they write. "High-status males with the least to fear were more positive, suggesting they were switching to a supportive, and potentially, mate attraction role."

While that particular explanation may be debatable (there's no evidence that specifically points to it), the raw results themselves provide a fascinating look at a rarely considered impetus for harassment in online games and in online spaces in general. So the next time some guy sends a wave of vitriol through your headset during an online match, think of it this way: he might just be a "low-performing" male compensating for his lack of skill.

PLoS ONE, 2015. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0131613 (About DOIs).