Playing a video game with a sexualized female character does not appear to impact women’s self-objectification or body satisfaction, according to a new study published in Psychology of Popular Media Culture. The findings suggest that video games have less impact on consumers than is sometimes claimed.
“I’ve been interested in media effects research for some time. It’s an area that has seen people (including scholars) make some pretty big claims, ranging from video games causing mass shootings to (in this area) thin-ideal models creating anorexia nervosa in women viewers,” explained lead researcher Christopher J. Ferguson (@CJFerguson1111), a professor of psychology at Stetson University.
“As I started looking at some of the research, my perspective was that the data available to support many of these claims seemed to be lacking (there are, in fact, no studies showing media is linked to clinically-diagnosed anorexia, despite that being a common belief.) So I had some concerns that maybe a culture of cautious skepticism hadn’t developed in the research community.”
“More recently some folks have started raising some of the same questions about video games. My colleagues and I thought it was a good opportunity to test this these questions with a rigorous design, one with clear standardization, careful matching of conditions and preregistration to limit any researcher expectancy effects.”
In the study, 98 female undergraduate students played one of two versions of the video game Tomb Raider for 30 minutes. In one version, the player’s character, Lara Croft, was wearing bikini bottoms and a tight wetsuit top. In another version, the character was wearing less revealing clothing — cargo pants and a tank top.
To obscure the purpose of the study, the participants then completed an unrelated pain tolerance task before completing assessments of self-objectification, body image dissatisfaction, sexist beliefs, and other measures.
The researchers found that women exposed to the more sexualized Lara Croft character were not more likely to have heightened self-objectification, body shame, or body satisfaction compared to those exposed to the non-sexualized character. Nor was there any evidence that exposure to the sexualized Lara Croft character increased the participants’ objectification of other women or sexist beliefs.
“Our study suggests that the impact of sexualization in games on women players is much less than people might imagine. Contrary to what social narratives suggest, playing as a sexualized avatar had no impact on women players’ body dissatisfaction, nor did it make them more aggressive toward other women,” Ferguson told PsyPost.
“I think our study contributes to a growing literature that suggests the impact of fictional media on viewers is much less than people have thought. Particularly when you hear ‘sky is falling’ type claims about fictional media, you can pretty much be sure they are wrong in most cases. That doesn’t mean media has no impact on us at all — but there’s a big difference between crying at sad movies and developing a mental illness due to watching media.”
Previous research has found that women often compare their appearances to photos in magazines and on Facebook. These comparisons are in turn related to heightened self-objectification.
“These findings do not mean that self-objectification or appearance comparison does not occur,” Ferguson and his colleagues wrote in the current study. Rather, it is possible that the participants “identified the sexualized female video game protagonist as fictional and thus not a realistic source of messaging about women’s bodies.”
The researchers also noted that “it is possible that tiny effects may not be discernible in brief, laboratory experiments but may nonetheless accumulate over time.”
“No one study defines a field, of course. And there’s a lot of attention on what impacts sexualization may have on male players. We’re hoping to turn to that in our next study,” Ferguson told PsyPost.
The study, “Examining the Effects of Exposure to a Sexualized Female Video Game Protagonist on Women’s Body Image“, was authored by Danielle Lindner, Melissa Trible, Ilana Pilato, and Christopher J. Ferguson.