Self-identified "gamers" are more racist and sexist than the general population. Science now supports the obvious.
Rachel Kowert, the research director at the nonprofit Take This, said that when the gaming identity is core to who you are as a person, it tends to reflect more exclusion than inclusion.
The paper was written by Kowert and her team and was published in the journal.
Individual and social identities are part of us. I am a female and I play a game. I'm a big fan of The Witcher. The researcher told Vice that these are his social identities. The way in which fusion is developed makes them more susceptible to more extreme behaviors.
It can be difficult to extricate the social identity from an individual's self-identification, and once that process occurs, people who've gone through identity fusion are more susceptible to extreme pro-group behavior.
The researchers wrote in their paper that the sense of community is a double-edged sword for people who identify themselves as gaming. While they experience the positive social aspects of belonging to a group, the gaming community is exposed to a lot of hate speech and other types of toxicity.
In the worst-case scenario, gamers may be lured into embracing extremists that lead them down the path to radicalization.
The study focused on those who play "Call of Duty" and those who play "Minecraft", and found that the "Call of Duty" crowd tended to be more racist than the "Minecraft" crowd.
Depending on what kind of people you are spending a lot of your time with, this can vary. I think it's more about the community you're in.
The researcher-cum-gaming-enthusiast warned that too much should not be read into the findings of the study.
She believes that games have more positive things to offer than negatives. We can't mitigate it if we don't have the conversation about how games are being used.
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