Although I would disagree that society does not have echelons. I do agree that games are good for studies like this. My issue is with the huge overarching claims because the study just doesn’t seem to support them given the very narrow venue.
Football teams may not be comparable to marathon runners but the are definitely comparable to other football teams and other football leagues. For instance if you play in the CFL, you are in a lower echelon than those in the NFL, and an even lower echelon than a “super star” from an NFL team. Or am I reading your comment wrong?
I genuinely enjoy boingboing right up until the point where they latch on to the SJW bullshit which seems to be all the time these days. We get it, men are assholes, women are eternal victims and anyone who disagrees is obviously misogynistic pond scum.
You weren’t really expecting a thoughtful engaged debate on the finer points of gender politics based on that shit were you?
Of course not, you were expecting exactly what you got, and now you get to be the victim. Yay!
Just breezed through the abstract in PLOS ONE. (PDF of the study here)
This statement was a definite showstopper:
In contrast, there is no evidence that a woman’s fitness is determined by her position in a hierarchy, making overt hierarchical navigation less important.
Perhaps not in the fossil record. But there certainly is evidence in various societies that the woman at the top of a hierarchical social structure definitely gets her pick of the litter as it were, allowing her choose her mates with stricter criteria and increase the fitness of her offspring.
No you’ve missed a key point. Unthreatened dudes are less likely to be shitbags to women, while dudes both threatened and unthreatened are equally unlikely to be shitbags to males. Thats the salient issue.
It was a hasty, tired analogy. My point was that competition requires sharing goals, and there is no hierarchy without competition. But there is no reason to assume that people share goals, despite a few people insisting upon it. When people are engaged in their own kinds of endeavor, there is no meaningful metric for comparing them with each other.
Conversely, when it seems that groups of people can be easily compared, this can be seen to imply redundancy. If lots of people are trying to do the same things to achieve the same goals as you are, then it is perhaps more probable that more people aren’t needed to do it, and it would be more prudent to try doing something else. In human affairs just as in the biosphere at large, diversity is key.
I just read through their charts. This study would be better titled “effects of K/D ratio on how pissed off dudes are, and how that effects how they treat people who never talk”
Apparently the number of female participants who spoke during the 160 odd games was 0. This is DEFINITELY selection bias. Lots of it. I don’t know if the study was poorly publicized or something, but I play with girls a lot online and they’re just as likely to taunt me and gloat as the dudes. They just pick their timing better for maximum sting. They’re often better at psyching me out than guys are. There’s something really screwy going on if none of the female participants said anything to the male participants.
We argue that a secondary benefit of increased female-directed hostility is that it simultaneously decreases a female’s confidence and perception of her self-worth (i.e. negging) while simultaneously increasing the perception of him being a dominant (i.e. socially valuable) mate. Higher-skilled (i.e. more dominant) males do not behave in this manner as there is no need for them to reinforce their dominance to maintain their attractiveness. Although there is no direct evidence in the literature that negative behaviour towards females increases a male’s mating opportunity, our results provide an interesting testable hypothesis requiring further investigation.
They’re suggesting they’d like to test whether pick-up artists get results under experimental conditions.
Not really, because the authors never actually looked at ‘status’ or ‘dominance’. They had access to the skill of the players they studied, which they equated to ‘status’ because they are evolutionary psychologists so explanations are unnecessary.
The charts are complete wastes of space. Free-hand lines presenting alleged trends, but without bothering with the data points which the lines purport to summarise. It is as if the authors looked at the Laffer Curve and thought “No, too much information there, we won’t make that mistake.”
Looking just a little closer at the experimental design I am becoming progressively less impressed.
They’re making elementary mistakes. For instance, they ceased their trial portion because of “significant time investment” rather than saying ahead of time when they planned on stopping their data collection. Then they decided to do an unnecessary chi squared analysis on data that’s already parameterized,and their p-values of less than 0.0001 seem implausible and fudged at best.
So far my assessment has gone from “this could be interesting” to “I’m not sure they’re covering their bases” on to “I’m starting to think this is a statistical fishing expedition”.
I’d much rather see plausible data,and thoughtful analysis.
The whole sexism angle is now irrelevant to the discussion for me now. I’m just too much into picking this mess of a study apart. It’s like these students haven’t ever taken Stats 101. Or rather, they took Stats 101, but went with the pass/fail option and just learned how to inappropriately dissect small data sets.
You can’t build a functional Frankenstein’s monster when all you have is one frog, no matter how many different kinds of scalpels are in your toolbag, and no matter how sharp they are.
What was it that Freud said? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar?
Why are they assuming everything is tied to sexual selection? I mean, yes the paricipants are most likely all WEIRDs going to school there, but still, some people are just there for the however many dollars, play some video games they grew up with, then spend that money on dinner and a little weed or booze.
The focus on Halo isn’t really all that weird. It’s just a game used to engage certain interactions, and to apply pressure/stress on participants. Halo isn’t an important feature. They could have done this study with any of the call of duty games, or Mario Kart, or Super Smash Bros, or anything competitive that requires a little skill… Beer pong even. What’s weird is the crappiness of their testing protocol, inappropriate use of various statistical methods, and the fact that they didn’t have any valid reasons for not sticking to their testing protocol.
Simple answer: The first author’s affiliation is with the “Ecology and Evolution Research Centre”. His evolutionary fitness depends on him making certain assumptions and reaching certain predetermined results.
I’ll admit that I haven’t read the study, but do they try to adjust for the fact that the sexism may be constant but just remains unvoiced in the players who are performing better?
I can see otherwise rational people who have just been spawncamped 20 times in a row coming out with all sorts of insults just to vent frustration but have trouble picturing the spawncampers doing the same. Seems a little problematic to extrapolate any wider social meaning from the data other than “angry people lash out and say whatever they think will be most likely to get a rise out of the people they are angry with.”
