[crAzerk]

Not taking any sides here but just offering some explanation from a Psych student's perspective (I love to discuss Psych stuff )

The Psychology Part
There is this thing in Psychology we learn called 'confirmation bias'. What this means is that it is human nature to seek out information that is in line with our beliefs, and ignore information that contradicts it.

The stereotype that exists is of course - 'females are bad at gaming' or some variation of this statement, whether in meaning or phrasing. This is the belief that many people have.

Thus when males encounter a female gamer who IS bad, he's going to naturally think 'I knew it' or 'yea she's a girl' or something along those lines. It reinforces his stereotype. It's reassuring to think that. It makes him feel at ease.

But when he encounters a female gamer who is GOOD, he is going to be like 'wait what? no way', and this contradiction to his belief is going to cause some amount of cognitive dissonance (in laymen's terms, make his mind uneasy).
He may then proceed to make misattributions such as 'She must have been lucky' or 'I am tired, that's why I lost', (which are called fundamental attribution errors) where he credits the success of the girl to situational factors(she got lucky) rather than personal factors (she is good)

These attributions help to ease the cognitive dissonance in him and thus such 'evidence' just 'bounces' off him, and he ignores these. 'Girls are bad at gaming' remains a personal belief. The effect may even be strongly positive reinforcing - that it could be a matter of personal pride, that he is defending the age-old sexist myth that Male > Female.
His group identity as a Male induces him to want to defend this at all cost (according to social identity theory), and that includes making such attribution errors and holding on to such stereotypes.


Therefore , for the awesome female gamers out there being discriminated against, do forgive the male chauvinists, they are almost programmed to behave this way. This kind of discriminatory behaviour of course does not apply only for the gender issue, but for race issues, and even simple ingroup-outgroup matters (e.g. SC2 vs WoW players. For example, 'All WoW players have no skill so they play WoW instead of SC2' )

For the males who still have this sort of stereotypes ingrained in them - do try to actively suppress it, and approach each female gamer with an open mind.

Quick Comments

	Zepph:	wow! Interesting :)
	syfChadMann:	nice