Federal government websites often end in. The site is secure. Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October Learn More or Try it out now. Performed the experiments: AG. Theoretical interpretation of results: CV. All relevant data are within the paper. This study investigates how exposure to sexist video games can decrease empathy for female violence victims. We hypothesized that playing violent-sexist video games would increase endorsement of masculine beliefs, especially among participants who highly identify with dominant and aggressive male game characters.
We also hypothesized that the endorsement of masculine beliefs would reduce empathy toward female violence victims. After gameplay, measures of identification with the game character, traditional masculine beliefs, and empathy for female violence victims were assessed. Our results supported the prediction that playing violent-sexist video games increases masculine beliefs, which occurred for male but not female participants who were highly identified with the game character.
Masculine beliefs, in turn, negatively predicted empathic feelings for female violence victims. Overall, our study shows who is most affected by the exposure to sexist-violent video games, and why the effects occur. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place. Empathy is an emotional response that corresponds to the feelings of another person, such as feeling distress when seeing another person in distress.
Numerous studies have shown that playing violent video games reduces feelings of empathy and makes people numb to the pain and suffering of others for a meta-analytic review see [ 4 ]. People feel empathy for other individuals, not for objects.
In some video games, such as the very popular Grand Theft Auto GTA games, female characters are treated as sex objects rather than as individuals worthy of respect. GTA main male characters are always depicted as hyper-masculine, dominant, and aggressive men. In contrast, the female characters are portrayed as sexual objectsβusually prostitutes or pole-dancersβwho are peripheral to the game narrative and whose sole purpose is to entertain the main male characters [ 5 ].
