Claim: There are some who assert video games can cause sexism or sexist attitudes.

Claim: Research indicates that video games cannot directly correlate to long-term behavior.

To discuss this, we need an education moment. The root of these claims is in social learning theory. Social learning theory, in short, dictates that we learn through observing behaviors as shown by models, internalizing them through memory and retention, and then displaying them through imitation until a desired outcome results.

This is taken even further by Craig Anderson who put forth the General Affective Aggression Model. According to Anderson, the chief proponent of GAAM, the model bases itself on social learning theory and other models. This model states that single-episode play/aggression comes from personality variables such as aggression mixed with video game play to change mood, heart rate arousal, cognitions, and result in violent behavior. The model further states that multiple episodes result from repeated violent gameplay causing single episode aggression.

In short, the more often you see violence or experience violence, the more likely you are to repeat violence as it has “seeped” into you resulting in an aggressive behavioral choice. The evidence for this model is exclusively found in research by Anderson and cohorts including Lindsey, Bushman, and others.

However, research done by Chris Ferguson time and time again refutes this claim every time Anderson publishes a new article. This shows us that the research is still very much undecided on this issue:

Paradigm change in aggression research: The time has come to retire the General Aggression Model

Violent Video Games and Aggression: Causal Relationship or Byproduct of Family Violence and Intrinsic Violence Motivation?

Evidence for publication bias in video game violence effects literature: A meta-analytic review

Twenty-Five Years of Research on Violence in Digital Games and Aggression

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly: A Meta-analytic Review of Positive and Negative Effects of Violent Video Games

Simply put, there is no strong indication that media outright causes human behavior such as aggression. There is research that media can help change a narrative, a memory, or compel someone to buy something. However, there’s no clear evidence that media in any form can cause you to do a certain thing, have a certain belief, or hold a certain opinion.

Edit: To address concerns that I selectively chose research, I have constructed an in-depth companion piece examining the research on video game violence and media effects on behavior. It’s incredibly long, full of relatively useless information, and leads to the conclusion above. However, if you’d like to delve deeper into the assertions of no strong causal or even correlational link due to conflicting researcher, feel free.

Personal, often psychological, factors are much more prevalent in any amount of change in any arena. Research on therapy has shown that the largest factor to behavioral or attitudinal change is what is known as “client and extratherapeutic factors.”

This means that change cannot and will not result, either when experiencing mental illness or not, without you wanting that change to happen.

Even one of the most classically-identified elements of cultural transmission of sexism, Barbie, has mixed research outcomes that show individual factors may be equally or more important than the display of sexism itself.

Simply put, you cannot assume that someone who plays with Barbie will be affected by Barbie for multiple reasons including researcher bias, problems with small and unrepresentative samples, and the overstatement of the effects of cultural imagery on behavior. Misogyny, sexism, and transmission of attitudes cannot be directly attributed any more meaningfully than personal factors.

Finally, to discuss a retort here: The third person effect.

This hypothesis, meaning it’s a proposed explanation of behavior, puts forth that we as media consumers tend to believe that we are not as effected by media as we are. We, through a cognitive bias of superiority, assume that we cannot be affected. The formation of this theory comes from sociology and is an explanation for the effects of propaganda in Iwo Jima in World War II.

This applies only when I am estimating the effect that media will have on another person. This does not apply when discussing the researched effects of media on people. As a result, the third-person effect does not apply here.

And no, it does not mean “the less likely you think you’ll be affected, the more likely you are to be affected.”