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Greater fusion with gaming culture predicts

heightened narcissism, psychopathy, hostile
sexism, and racism
by Eric W. Dolan — November 15, 2022 in Dark Triad

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People who experience identity fusion with the online gaming community
  Study links identity threat among white
tend to have heightened levels of antisocial personality traits and hostile
evangelicals to the belief Trump’s
attitudes, according to new research published in Frontiers in election was part of God’s plan

Communication.
 Psychopathic tendencies are

Identity fusion is a psychological concept that refers to the merging of associated with an elevated interest in
fire, study finds
 one’s personal identity with that of a group. This can lead to a range of
behaviors, from feeling strongly defensive of the group’s reputation to
 When texts suddenly stop: Study
 being willing to make sacrifices for it. Identity fusion has been studied in investigates why people “ghost” — and
relation to a wide variety of groups, from sports teams to religions, and it is it’s consequences
 thought to play an important role in group cohesion and loyalty.
 Autistic people outperform
neurotypicals in a cartoon version of
 an emotion recognition task

  Attractive female students no longer

earned higher grades when classes
Previous research has indicated that online video gaming communities
moved online during COVID-19
might be particularly conducive to identity fusion. The authors of the new
research were interested in whether this identity fusion could help explain  New psychology research reveals
extremism among a subset of gamers. men’s motives for sending unsolicited
dick pics

“In 2019, I read in a report put out by the Anti-Defamation League that 1 in
4 game players reported being exposed to white supremacist ideology
while within a digital gaming space,” said Rachel Kowert, the research
director at Take This and corresponding author of the new research. “That
number seemed so incredibly high!”

“Seeing such a high number literally stopped me in my tracks – I was

really shocked to see the number be so high. That set me on a new
trajectory within my own research to uncover why this kind of behavior
was so found to be prevalent within games.”

The researchers used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (Mturk) platform to

recruit two samples of American video gamers, which included 598
participants in total. The gamers completed a variety of validated
psychological assessments, along with a measure of identity fusion with
gaming culture.

Fusion with gaming culture was positively associated with the willingness
to fight for gaming culture. In other words, people who agreed with
statements such as “I make gaming culture strong” were more likely to
also agree with statements such as “I would fight someone insulting or
making fun of gaming culture.”

Fusion with gaming culture was also associated with heightened

narcissism, psychopathy, hostile sexism, extrinsic racism, and recent
aggressive behaviors. This was true even after controlling for most played RECENT

game genre, years playing games, weekly play time, gender, right-wing
 Psychopathic tendencies are
identity, and white nationalist identity.
associated with an elevated interest in
fire, study finds
The researchers also uncovered some moderating variables. In particular,
heightened loneliness and insecure attachment styles strengthened the  Web-based exercise intervention leads
association between fusion with gaming culture and the willingness to fight to mental health improvements in 3
for gaming culture. months, according to controlled trial

 When texts suddenly stop: Study

The findings provide evidence that “identification with so-called ‘toxic
investigates why people “ghost” — and
gamer cultures’ is a vulnerability that can be uniquely leveraged by it’s consequences
extremists for radicalization and recruitment,” Kowert told PsyPost. “This
is not to say that all people who play games will be radicalized. Rather, the  Adolescents with eating disorders
report exposure to “pro-Ana” materials
social culture of digital games are uniquely vulnerable to this kind of
on TikTok without searching for it
behavior.”
 Greater fusion with gaming culture
The results provide insight into gamers in general. But the researchers predicts heightened narcissism,
were interested in whether the link between identity fusion and extremism psychopathy, hostile sexism, and
racism
would be especially strong in certain gaming communities. For their third
study, they recruited a sample of 315 participants who play Call of Duty
and 330 participants who play Minecraft. While Call of Duty is known for
 its highly competitive nature, Minecraft is considered a more easygoing
gaming experience.

Kowert and her colleagues found that the links between fusion with
gaming culture and antisocial tendencies were stronger among Call of
Duty players compared to Minecraft players.

“I was surprised to find such a stark difference between Call of Duty and
Minecraft players once identity fusion was taken into consideration,” she
told PsyPost. “While I had long hypothesized that the social environment
was a more significant influence on behavior, this work provides the first
steps in empirically demonstrating that when it comes to anti-social (e.g.,
racism, sexism, etc.) outcomes.”

One caveat to note is the correlational nature of the findings. It is possible

that fusion with gaming culture leads to heightened levels of narcissism,
psychopathy, sexism, and other traits. But it is also possible that the
relationship runs in the opposite direction.

“There are a lot of questions to still be addressed,” Kowert said. “For

instance, we discuss the differences between Call of Duty and Minecraft
players in relation to the different levels of social toxicity of their respective
communities alone. However, it is possible that game mechanics
(competitive versus cooperative) and game content (visually realistic, first
person shooter with political undertones verses visually unrealistic,
sandbox game) have some impact. We are planning on digging deeper
into these differences in future work.”

“It is important to understand that digital games are wonderful places that
have more positive things than negative things to offer across the board,”
Kowert added. “However, I think it is important that we have conversations
about the negative societal repercussions we are seeing come from these
spaces because if we do not start having the conversations about how
games are being leveraged in negative ways we will never have the
opportunity to start conversations about solutions.”

The study, “Not just a game: Identity fusion and extremism in gaming
cultures“, was authored by Rachel Kowert, Alexi Martel, and William B.
Swann.

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