Abstract
The link between gaming and negative outcomes has been explored by previous research and has led to the widespread adverse attitude toward gaming (ATG) and gamers, especially from those who are unfamiliar with this activity. By implementing an audit study with gamers and non-gamers as participants (N = 1,280), we found that non-gamer participants rated gamers less as similar to their ideal marriage partners compared to non-gamers, while gamer participants did not differentiate between gamers and non-gamers in the ideal marriage partners similarity rating (IMPSR). The findings also revealed that the difference in IMPSR between gamer and non-gamer participants toward gamers was completely mediated by their ATG. These results imply that non-gamers consider gaming as an undesired characteristic, and this is due to the relatively negative attitude of non-gamers toward gaming. Current study provides a new perspective on exploring the effect of gaming by investigating the social interaction between gamers and non-gamers in real-world and suggests that the unfamiliarity of gaming can lead to the negative ATG, which may, ultimately, place gamers at a disadvantage in the context of mate selection.
Highlights
Video games have become an increasingly popular form of entertainment (Williams et al, 2008) over the past decades
The current study revealed an intergroup bias of non-gamer participants toward gamers in the Chinese marriage market, this result supports our Hypothesis 1, and we found that female gamer participants showed no preference between gamers and non-gamers when choosing a potential mate while male gamers make higher ideal marriage partners similarity rating (IMPSR) toward gamers than non-gamers
The mediation models indicated that the relatively low IMPSR of non-gamer participants toward gamers is full or partial due to their more negative attitude toward gaming (ATG), this result supports our Hypothesis 2. These results suggest that “gamer” has become an undesirable label in the context of mate selection for Chinese non-gamers. We argue that this discrimination is due to the stereotypes associated with gaming and various disadvantageous traits which were stereotypically attributed to gamers
Summary
Video games have become an increasingly popular form of entertainment (Williams et al, 2008) over the past decades. Most existing game-related research has focused on the impact of gaming (Anderson and Bushman, 2001), and on the interaction between gaming and gamers (Caroux et al, 2015), while insufficient attention has been paid to the social interaction between gamers and non-gamers. Gamers—the label used to refer people who play games—have become a huge social category (Nauroth et al, 2014). Gaming has been widely related to diverse negative outcomes, such as aggressive behavior (Gentile et al, 2004; Carnagey et al, 2007; Zhang et al, 2021) and psychological dysfunction (Gentile et al, 2011; Tortolero et al, 2014). Other studies have suggested that gaming may not be a source of real-world negative outcomes (Ferguson, 2010; Valadez and Ferguson, 2012; Király et al, 2017; Ferguson and Wang, 2020), highlighting that there is little consensus on the relationship between negative outcomes and gaming
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