Low-quality studies proliferate claims of misogyny and internalized misogyny in men and women due to sexualized representations of women in gaming, but high-quality studies report no association or yield non-significant support for such claims.

According to the study:

On balance, the current state of the data could not support beliefs that sexualized game content influences either players’ mental well-being or sexist attitudes and behaviors.

​

Effect sizes for sexualization effects in video games were both nonsignificant and below the r = 0.10 threshold we used for interpreting results as hypothesis supportive.

​

[E]ffect sizes were lower in best practices studies.

​

[E]ffect sizes may be spuriously inflated by both less wellcontrolled studies, and potentially by researchers’ expectancy effects.

​

Preregistration can help reduce researcher expectancy effects and reduce false positive results, which were demonstrated to be an issue for this field. Without preregistration, effect size estimates may be spuriously high, not a reflection of true effects. For instance, Simmons et al. (2011) estimate that without pre-registration, combinations of researcher degrees of freedom can increase the false-positive rate to over 60%.