Interesting and important study! But the press glosses are mis-representative. The study [1] doesn't even mention harassment; also, because of the small sample size and 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, but didn't have the statistical power to conclude a correlation about hostile sexist statements.

What I found interesting methodologically is that for the analysis they had two exclude two 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 had to do for the purposes of their thesis and statistical analysis doesn't correspond to the experience women players may have. That is, I believe, if we excluded 5% of the most awful people online as outliers, the Net would be lovely!

[1]: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131613

On 07/22/2015 10:02 PM, Neotarf wrote:
> "For their latest study, published in the journal PLOS One last week, [Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff, researchers at the University of New South Wales and Miami University, respectively] watched how men treated women during 163 plays of the video game Halo 3.
>
> "As they watched the games play out and tracked the comments that players made to each other, the researchers observed that — no matter their skill level, or how the game went — men tended to be pretty cordial to each other. Male players who were good at the game also tended to pay compliments to other male and female players.
>
> "Some male players, however — the ones who were less-skilled at the game, and performing worse relative their peers — made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are /literally/ losers."
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07/20/men-who-harass-women-online-are-quite-literally-losers-new-study-finds/

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