A recent study published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking has supposedly found that there is no link between sexist attitudes and playing video games (Breuer 2015). Many people are trumpeting this study as the death knell for feminist criticism of games
(see, for example: “New Study Finds No Link Between Gaming and Sexist Attitudes” Forbes, 2015), despite the fact that the study is rather shallow in what it addresses as sexism.
The study is set-up as follows: the researchers followed a large group of Germans (824, to be exact) for three years and gave them a survey over that course of time that indicates certain sexist beliefs (controlling for age and education). At the beginning and end, the survey answers did not indicate any change in response toward more sexism associated with video game use.(Note: I do not have access to this study in full so I am relying on the study abstract linked above and the article “Are Video Games Making People Sexist?” for the details of the study throughout.)
The main problem I see with the study is that it relies on self-reported data and does not use an adequate assessment of the kind of sexist beliefs feminists would expect to result from playing video games.
In the study, sexist beliefs are determined by the responses to three questions:
- Should men be responsible for major decisions in the family?
- Should men take on leadership roles in mixed-sex groups?
- Should women take care of the home, even if both partners are wage earners?
As is common knowledge with self-reported data, people can lie, and will often lie to make themselves look better. So, for example, most people will know that the least sexist answer to these questions is the “correct” socially acceptable answer. All of these questions are fairly obvious measures of sexist attitudes, and most reasonable people will know to give the “acceptable” answer.
The most damning problem with using such a self-assessment for sexist beliefs is that the more relevant concern feminists have about how culture affects beliefs is in regard to implicit biases and associations, which are not measured by a test such as the one used in this study. To use an example: we know that, if police officers were given a questionnaire with a question like “Are black people more threatening than white people?” most of them will answer “No”. Most of them will even believe their answer to be true and will not be explicitly lying. However, something like an Implicit Association Test (IAT) or other measures that show unconscious bias will likely reveal that they do find black people more threatening than white people, in contradiction to what they would self-report (see: Stereotype Threat). Such implicit and unconscious biases are the focus of feminist criticism, just as they are the focus of criticism when it comes to racism as it manifests itself in policing and society at large.
We live in a culture that highly approves of “equality” in superficial and facile ways, and as a result we are often blind to the ways in which inequality expresses itself, thinking our culture is already egalitarian. People assume that racism is no longer a problem, for instance, because people no longer use the “n-word” publicly and we elected a black President – even though people still use racist code words like “thug” or “urban youth” and apply such terms to our black President. And people often assume that the genders are largely equal and thus feminism is no longer necessary, but still express subtle misogyny in similar ways to racism (like stereotypes concerning “shrill” or “emotional” women, for example – words that hide their negative baggage better than a belief like “women are the inferior sex”). Feminists are thus not just concerned with outright and blatant examples of misogyny, but with the way misogyny expresses itself in more subtle ways – and that’s precisely how misogyny tends to manifest within a culture that claims to value equality and attempts to hide its inequality behind obfuscation and coded language. So, while this study does seem to show video games do not affect conscious sexist beliefs, it does not address whether they would affect such unconscious or implicit biases – the kinds of biases feminists are largely concerned with.
Another problem with the study, which is also related to the assessment questions used to determine sexist beliefs, is that it isn’t clear why we would expect video games to affect a sexist belief like “Men should make major decisions for the family.” Most video games do not involve situations in which you play as, say, a family. Typically in video games what you find are men as the protagonists, and women only presented as background pieces, sexual objects, or as prizes to be attained/saved. It is not clear that my being able to murder a prostitute in Grand Theft Auto would change my view for a question like “Should women do the chores?” But it might change my view for a question like “Are female sex workers inferior to others?” or “Do promiscuous women deserve the higher rates of violence they face?” or questions more specific to what is typically experienced in a video game. The questions in the study mainly address gender roles in relation to familial relationships, which are not frequently depicted in video games. The one question not in the context of a family relationship, asking about men taking leadership in mixed-sex groups, better reflects video games to a degree, except for the fact that there are rarely mixed-sex groups in games – but I would think the nearly de facto role of men as protagonists suits that question’s context well enough. I do not think this particular point is a major criticism of the study, but I raise this issue because it is certainly something to consider.
In short, I find that the study by Breuer et al. (2015) does not adequately address the criticism feminists raise concerning sexism in video games, which generally concerns more implicit biases. At best, the study shows that we live in a culture where outright public avowals of misogyny concerning gender roles are not increased by video game use. It might tell us that people are not likely to express a view that men are superior to women if they play video games, but it does not tell us how they act and behave or reveal more subtle biases – it does not tell us if they are more likely to harass/abuse women, if they are more likely to see feminism as unnecessary and equality already achieved, if they have biases of women as inferior or as sex objects that they do not believe consciously or publicly, and so on. The study leaves a lot to be a desired and does not really address feminist concerns about the effects of misogyny in video games.
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