Science Proves That Men Who Harass Women Online Are Literally Losers

This month, the pantheon of reassuringly obvious science has grown even larger, thanks to the work of inquisitive academic duo Michael Kasumovic (from the University of New South Wales in Australia) and Jeffrey Kuznekoff (Miami University in the US).

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. Only 189 players were involved, and only in the game Halo 3 over the course of 163 matches.

Kasumovic and Kuznekoff used the online multi-player game Halo 3, in which players can form teams of up to four people at a time, as the focus of the study.

But a new study goes further into the minds of dudes who harass women online, particularly in video games – and it turns out these guys are losers, literally. “This is not to say that women did not play, just that they did not speak”.

When it comes to beta men trying to re-balance their insecurities by putting women down, we’d love to see this study extend to cases of e.g. catcalling and domestic violence, too.

Unbeknownst to the players, the researchers had connected an audio playback device to their Xbox controllers, which allowed them to “broadcast pre-recorded audio clips to other players as if they were speaking to each other through the real-time voice channel”. But players that were performing poorly were much more likely to make negative comments specifically toward “female” teammates, as well. We found that skill determined the frequency of positive and negative statements spoken towards both male- and female-voiced teammates.

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. As he rose to the top of the leaderboard, he found that the lower-ranked males behaved more subserviently and offered comments of praise over the in-game chat. But the better a player gets, the more likely he is to be nice to ladies. Several high profile female game developers were targeted with a torrent of misogynistic abuse, including rape and death threats, coordinated by factions of male gamers using sites like 4Chan and Reddit.

“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”, the researchers write.