Men who harass women online are quite literally losers, new study finds | Hacker News Reader

Men who harass women online are quite literally losers, new study finds

washingtonpost.com

53 pointsacabrahams27 comments

This is shitty journalism at its worst. The study presented a very conservative finding, which is that men who lose in online games are more likely to be hostile, particularly towards those they don't think are in the in-group. That is understandable.

The journalist in question extrapolated it to Reddit, Twitter, 4chan, and god knows what else. All the while making huge conjectures about how this means all harassers are low-status losers (a word used pejoratively, not descriptively).

Pathetic.

I don't think you're clear on how journalism works.

News pieces report relatively factual material. That's the first part of what you identify. But then there are other kinds of writing that also appear in newspapers. [1] This in particular is from their blog The Intersect [2], which is cultural commentary focused on the Internet. It is written by their "digital culture critic". [3]

So cultural commentary is exactly this person's job. And I don't think it's a giant stretch extrapolating research about men harassing women online to... men harassing women online. Of course, you could be right: some online harassers may also be high-status winners sending out semi-literate email screeds from their mansions and yachts and whatnot.

So no, this isn't shitty journalism. It would be a shitty news piece if it were a news piece. But since it's not, I'd call it a decent commentary piece.

[1] Hopefully this isn't too big a surprise; this is literally what they tell fifth graders about journalism. E.g.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/english/creativewr... or http://www.dispatchnie.com/content/pages/types-of-articles/t...

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/

[3] I learned all this by a) clicking on the big title at the topic of the column, and b) clicking on the writer info at the bottom. Next time if you're wondering what sort of article you're reading, those are good places to start.

Seems totally plausible to me. And it goes well with this paragraph from a recent Jon Ronson interview[1]:

"I once interviewed a prison psychiatrist, James Gilligan, who told me that every murderer he treated was harbouring a central secret – which was that they felt humiliated. 'I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed or humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed,' he said. His conclusion: 'All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.'"

It's things like this that make it really obvious that we're primates, hardwired for status. Not that we can't overcome it, of course. But it takes work.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/18/katie-hopkins-j...

That should give pause to people who attempt to shame others to enact social change.

No, no it shouldn't. The reason we have patriarchy at all is millennia of male violence. Your notion that people should avoid pushing for social change because guys may hurt or kill them is a) abhorrent, and b) exactly why we need the social change.

Where did I say that people should avoid pushing for social change? I pointed out the effect of a tool: shaming. It's bad for people and as the article says it can lead to violence.

Social change is good. Shaming is a bad tool.

Please describe three social changes you are making happen and your shame-free techniques.

> It's things like this that make it really obvious that we're primates, hardwired for status.

Or maybe it's an indicator that our incredibly hierarchical society inflicts psychological violence on people because it holds them to conform to impossible shapes in order to fit into the system.

I have a lot of contempt for any abductive reasoning that explains Western Capitalist society with unobservable primordial determinism. Anthropologists and primatologists both observe numerous counterexamples to the idea that we are hardwired to vie for status.

What is true is that we would like to be valued as worthy by the people we invest a lot of importance in. Shame and humiliation is not the absence of status, it is a response to a positive situation of being socially attacked in some way. In a society where status is governed by intricate, interlocking, alienating systems of rules and violence, no one but the very few priviliged (and even then) can escape feeling shamed by their social surroundings.

One, I agree that biology is not destiny. (Indeed, I believe I said the opposite.)

Two, I agree that our current society is a mess, and share your desire that it be made better.

That said, I have never seen a primatologist suggest that we aren't wired for status. Certainly our closest relatives, chimpanzees, are. (See, e.g., de Waal's Chimpanzee Politics.)

I think it's important to acknowledge that tendency if we want to make the world less of a mess. For example, consider how we deal with a different inbuilt tendency: violence. We know that all humans can be violent, which is why children are taught early and often that violence is wrong. It's why we have a whole system of customs and laws that constrain violent behavior. We, as a culture, are working to eliminate it, but we can't do that by pretending it isn't part of our nature.

I think we should do the same for status. Rather than constructing a system that, as you say, helps the privileged maintain their sense of status, we to acknowledge that an irrational drive for status is part of our roots, and to build a society that helps us overcome that.

This is an interesting study, but would likely benefit from some additional research[0][1].

From a journalistic perspective, though, the article on the study is terrible. Not merely because of the way it jumps to conclusions from a single study (the discourse on Reddit/Twitter is likely to be somewhat different than in Halo 3), but because the article itself was about online harassment, and yet the only figure they deigned to include was about the number of positive comments.

If you look at the graphs for negative statements[2], you find that although female voices provoke slightly more negative comments for low amounts of deaths, male voices get significantly more negative comments when the death count is higher. This is not as easily to interpret.

0. The actual study: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

1. For example, does this trend persist in games that are not "boys games"? We assume that the majority of Halo 3 players are men, but is there any difference between how men and women comment to perceived men and women? Why did they not include the control (playing without voice chat) as a baseline?

2. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=l...

> “As men often rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status,” Kasumovic writes, “the increase in hostility towards a woman by lower-status males may be an attempt to disregard a female’s performance and suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social rank.”

I would agree with that opinion — I think we've all experienced men behaving stupidly when they overly value and then perceive a threat to their masculinity. Gaming is certainly an activity where we see that to more of an extreme.

I wonder though the breadth of the data though. Other metrics like age, or even play time, and the like may equally as telling.

On your first point, yes - this is also seen in other studies. It's known a the masculine overcompensation thesis. Willer 2011 discusses four studies: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/documents/o...

Of course they are. My own findings corroborate this.

My personal theory is that the reason the tech industry is so hostile towards women is that it is mostly comprised of "nerds" and "geeks" who, being lower-status in society while usually being part of the dominant group (white men), are much more likely to be aggressive towards people not part of that group, women and people of color.

It's been quite a while that nerds and geeks are not lower status in our society.

Everyone claims to be a geek just for the hype. Superheroes movies are the most profitable, the video game industry is enormous.

People who waste their time and energy on obvious, pointless studies and cite arbitrary Halo data in their research are losers.

Halo 3 on XBox Live is absolutely representative of every person on the internet. I don't see how you could even question that.

People who harass people online are losers, sure, but doing your study on XBox Live is a bit like going to the Dead Sea to test oceanic salinity levels.

Seems a bit of a stretch to make this statement on a study based on Halo 3.

_____ who harass _____ online are quite literally losers

Did we really need a study for this?

I did not read the study, but the one chart in the article (which, I assume is supposed to reinforce the message) is over - interpreted. What I see is that mm relationship status the same and mf gets better with skill. I interpret it as better men looking for women to mate with. The not so good ones do not even try. Now, if the chart was about negative behaviour then it would make sense for the article.

“As men often rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status,”

Stand out line. Men who deny this are mostly guilty of being unaware of their own bias, ie: guilty of being human. This can be corrected.

Next they will be saying Internet Trolls are just sad, lonely people. That will set off the intertubes into a real frenzy.

That graph looks questionable.

And men who harass women in person are winners? I don't really see what this study is trying to imply.

Let's not lose sight of the main point here: that men who harass women online are losers.

...And let's not lose sight of the fact that people who speak in blanket statements who are suppose to be objective are generally positing a very separatist idea.

Women who harass men online are winners?

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