An interesting study is being widely commented on, but, as is often
the case, the press glosses about “harassment” are a bit askew. For
instance, the Washington Post (cleverly) reports that “Men Who
Harass Women Online are Quite Literally Losers.” The actual study is
entitled “Male
Status and Performance Moderates Female-directed Hostile and Amicable
Behaviour”. In the study, Halo 3 games were recorded by way of three
experimental player accounts: control (no voice channel), male, and
female voices. Interactions with these accounts and other (focal)
players were transcribed and coded (N=126) as positive, negative, or
neutral. Skill level of focal players correlated with the valence of
their comments; that is, higher skill male players correlated with more
positive and less negative statements towards women.
The authors don’t mention “harassment.” Also, because of the small
sample size and that only 13% of that (11 individuals) uttered hostile
sexist statements, “We found that the presence of sexist
statements was not determined by differences in maximum skill achieved.”
The paper is really about the extent to which lower-status male players
are bigger jerks to women players. They did find this with respect to
negative and positive statements – and we could (rightfully) call this
sexist itself – but they didn’t have the statistical power to conclude
anything about hostile sexist statements.
What I found interesting, methodologically, is that for the analysis
they had to exclude two mega-jerks as outliers. “For the examination of
negative statements, there were two focal players in the female-voiced
manipulation that made 10 more negative statements than the next highest
individuals (greater than 5 standard deviations from the mean). As a
result, we removed them from our analysis to ensure they did not skew
our results towards significance.” Given the “rotten apple” thesis (a
minority of jerks can spoil the barrel), what they did for the purposes
of statistical analysis doesn’t correspond to the experience women
players may have. A minority of awful people can send the majority of
awfulness. That is, I believe, if we excluded 5% of the most awful
people online as outliers, the Net would be a lovely place!
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