Men who bully women online really ARE losers

But now a study can back up this old piece of wisdom - and show men who pick on women online really are losers.

Men who are losing a game of Halo 3 will be abusive to female players, while men who are good at the game will keep their cool, the study has shown.

Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff, researchers at the University of New South Wales and Miami University, respectively, studied how men treated women during 163 plays of the online multiplayer shoot-em-up Halo 3. 

Players are able to communicate and can hear each others' voices by using headsets as they play against each other over the internet. 

They found that men were usually polite to one another, regardless of whether they won or lost the game.

Male players who were good at the game even payed other players - both men and women - compliments.

But the male players who were losing the game often lashed out and became abusive - but only to female players.

So men who abuse women online are in this case literally losers, according to the study. 

'We show that lower-skilled players were more hostile towards a female-voiced teammate, especially when performing poorly,' they said in the study.

'In contrast, lower-skilled players behaved submissively towards a male-voiced player in the identical scenario. 

'This difference in gender-directed behaviour became more extreme with poorer focal-player performance.' 

Kasumovic explained to the Washington Post his theory that a relatively recent influx of females to previously male dominated online spaces may disrupt the male-only hierarchy.

This is not a worry if you are winning, as you maintain your status, but can be threatening to those at the bottom of the social pile, Kasumovic said.

'As men often rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status,' Kasumovic wrote, 'the increase in hostility towards a woman by lower-status males may be an attempt to disregard a female's performance and suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social rank.'

(dailymail.co.uk)