Department of Psychology, Stetson University, 421 N. Woodland Blvd., DeLand, FL, 32729, USA.
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843, USA.
J Youth Adolesc. 2017 Dec;46(12):2446-2459. doi: 10.1007/s10964-017-0700-x. Epub 2017 Jun 21.
Gabbiadini, A., Riva, P., Andrighetto, L., Volpato, C., & Bushman, B, (PloS ONE, 2016) provided evidence for a connection between "sexist" video games and decreased empathy toward girls using an experimental paradigm. These claims are based on a moderated mediation model. They reported a three-way interaction between game condition, gender, and avatar identification when predicting masculine ideology in their original study. Masculine ideology was associated, in turn, with decreased empathy. However, there were no main experimental effects for video game condition on empathy. The current analysis considers the strength of the evidence for claims made in the original study on a sample of 153 adolescents (M = 16.812, SD = 1.241; 44.2% male). We confirmed that there was little evidence for an overall effect of game condition on empathy toward girls or women. We tested the robustness of the original reported moderated mediation models against other, theoretically derived alternatives, and found that effects differed based on how variables were measured (using alternatives in their public data file) and the statistical model used. The experimental groups differed significantly and substantially in terms of age suggesting that there might have been issues with the procedures used to randomly assign participants to conditions. These results highlight the need for preregistration of experimental protocols in video game research and raise some concerns about how moderated mediation models are used to support causal inferences. These results call into question whether use of "sexist" video games is a causal factor in the development of reduced empathy toward girls and women among adolescents.
加比亚迪尼、里瓦、安德里格托、沃尔帕托和布希曼（PloS ONE，2016 年）使用实验范式为“性别歧视”视频游戏与女孩同理心降低之间的联系提供了证据。这些说法基于一个调节中介模型。他们在原始研究中报告了游戏条件、性别和头像认同之间的三向交互作用，以预测男性意识形态。男性意识形态与同理心降低有关。然而，视频游戏条件对同理心没有主要的实验效应。目前的分析考虑了在 153 名青少年（M=16.812，SD=1.241；44.2%为男性）样本中对原始研究中提出的主张的证据强度。我们证实，几乎没有证据表明游戏条件对女孩或女性同理心有总体影响。我们测试了原始报告的调节中介模型对其他理论衍生替代模型的稳健性，发现基于变量的测量方式（使用公共数据文件中的替代方法）和使用的统计模型，效应有所不同。实验组在年龄方面存在显著且实质性的差异，这表明在随机分配参与者到不同条件的过程中可能存在一些问题。这些结果强调了在视频游戏研究中预先注册实验方案的必要性，并对如何使用调节中介模型来支持因果推论提出了一些担忧。这些结果质疑使用“性别歧视”视频游戏是否是青少年同理心降低对女孩和女性发展的一个因果因素。
