Gamers more likely to friend trash-talking males and polite females

Men who play aggressively online are more likely to have their friend requests accepted than those who are polite and passive, a new report has found.

Alarmingly, however, the opposite is true for women who are more likely to have their friend requests accepted if they are friendly and positive.

That’s the findings of sex role stereotyping report published on Gamasutra which saw people send out friend requests on PSN to players whom with they had just competed in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

Participants created two PSN accounts with gendered names – one male and one female. The same characters were used across all matches, as were the pre-recorded voice chat snippets that were used to further reflect the appropriate gender.

Friend requests were then sent immediately at the close of a match, with the results recorded as either an accept, deny or no response (within 10 minutes).

In total 238 online game sessions were recorded spanning 1,371 unique participants, 520 of whom responded within the time limit.

Of these 520 it was found that women are generally more likely to be accepted than men. However, men who uttered the negative voice snippets tended to get more accepts than those who were positive or quiet.

For women, however, those who were quiet had the biggest uptake. The level of skill demonstrated had no noticeable impact on friend request responses.

The take home message is that female players who sent out friend requests have a greater chance of being accepted than male players do,” the post stated.

Furthermore, the chances of acceptance differs based on how the player spoke in the game, and congruence with gender stereotypes. Male players who spoke negatively or trash talk in the game and female players who were silent or meek have the greatest chances in getting their friend request accepted. In a way, men and women are treated differently in gaming.

Why are there differences in acceptance rates between gender and utterance types? As predicted by Expectation States Theory with the Social Identity Model of Deindividuation effects, male and female players who do not violate gender stereotypes are more accepted by other players.

Since there is so little identifying information, you could say that people would imagine what others look like, starting with stereotypes. The negative utterances from the male player would suggest that other players saw it as normative behaviours for a stereotypical male player.”