Study: Men Who Harass Women Online Are Literally Losers

Hold on to your hats, this might come as a massive surprise.

Researchers have found that men who harass women on the internet are, quite literally, losers who have inferiority complexes!

The study was published in the journal PLOS One and was carried out by researchers from the University of New South Wales and Miami University.

The researchers watched 163 plays of the online video game Halo 3 and observed the way male players treated female players while playing the game.

They found that the comments made between players varied based on both gender and skill levels. The men who were good at the game tended to treat everyone well. Men of all skill levels were generally nicer online to the other men. However, men who sucked at the game and were more likely to send female players angry and lewd comments. Yep… these guys making the awful, sexist comments were quite literally losers.

Researchers have made comparisons to other online forums, and video games have been described as being a great proxy to studying real-life behaviour, particularly Halo 3. 

They say it shows that when women enter and disrupt a male-dominated hierarchy, it leads to “hostile behaviour from poor performing males who stand to lose the most status,”

“We suggest that low-status males increase female-directed hostility to minimise the loss of status as a consequence of hierarchical reconfiguration resulting from the entrance of a woman into the competitive arena,” they wrote.

“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 and suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social rank,”

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of some guy’s sexist vitriol on the internet, you probably won’t be remotely surprised by these findings.

What do you think?