Abstract :
[en] Despite a growing body of statistics highlighting comparable gender prevalence and performance in gaming, the cliché persists that women are gaming amateurs or only “casual” players. Does the lower performance of women who are observed in certain video game contexts result from a stereotype threat effect (Steele & Aronson, 1995)? To test this, we investigated video game performance in two studies (N1 = 130; N2 = 139). In Study 1, participants were confronted with the stereotype that women would perform worse in video games than men. In Study 2, we explored a reversed stereotype, namely that women would outpace men in some video game genres. We found no evidence of an effect of stereotype threat on gaming performance in either study. However, performance varied across gender and game genre: female participants generally outperformed males in Study 1, but male participants outperformed females in Study 2. Although we found no stereotype threat effect, perceived frustration indicated expected gender differences in Study 1: after reading the stereotypical article, female participants felt significantly more frustrated than males. This suggests a subtler stereotype threat, affecting cognitive and motivational rather than behavioral outcomes. The present findings add to the current literature, which assumes that the stereotype threat effect is not universal but occurs only under certain conditions.
Scopus citations®
without self-citations
0