There is a stereotype that gamers are physically unattractive compared with non-gamers. However, it is unlikely that gaming causes people to become less attractive, and more likely that causality runs in the other direction (that more attractive people are less likely to game than less attractive people). And that is one of the findings of this 2024 NBER Working Paper by Andy Chung (University of Reading) and co-authors. However, Chung et al. aren't interested in only identifying that there is a descriptive relationship between attractiveness and gaming, but looking at the mechanism. They propose the following:
Given that physical attractiveness confers advantages in face-to-face interactions within social or leisure activities, individuals deemed more physically attractive will face a higher opportunity cost of engaging in video-gaming. Consequently, we hypothesize a negative relationship between beauty and gaming time, suggesting that individuals considered more attractive are likely to spend less time gaming. In other words, good-looking gamers will be relatively scarce because of the higher cost of gaming that they face.
They test their hypotheses using National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), which has:
...a representative sample of American adolescents spanning grades 7 through 12 (generally ages 12-18) during the 1994-95 school year, with four follow-up waves, the most recent collected between 2016 and 2018.
Chung et al. use data from Wave I (from 1994-95) and Wave IV (from 2008), representing teenagers and adults respectively. Interestingly:
In each wave, at the end of each interview, the field interviewer rated the physical attractiveness of the respondent...
This gives a rating of 1-5 (1 being 'very attractive' and 5 being 'very unattractive') for each respondent. Given small numbers of ratings 4 and 5, Chung et al. combine those two categories together. They also create a binary indicator for 'attractive', equal to one if the rating is 1 or 2, and equal to zero otherwise. In terms of gaming:
we consider the time spent video gaming based on the interviewees’ responses to the following question:...
In the past seven days, how many hours did you spend playing video or computer games, or using a computer? Do not count internet use for work or school.
Looking at attractiveness and teen gaming, Chung et al. find that:
...the estimated coefficient for being “attractive or very attractive as a teen” is negative and statistically significant at the 10% level, while the coefficient for “unattractive or very unattractive as a teen” is negative but essentially zero statistically... The effects of looks are not negligible; for example, the difference in the incidence of gaming between attractive and unattractive teens is 2.9 percentage points, compared to a mean incidence of 54 percent.
So, Chung et al. confirm the hypothesis that more attractive teens are less likely to game than less attractive teens. Interestingly though, the effect seems to be limited to the extensive margin (whether a person games or not), and not on the intensive margin (how many hours they spend gaming), since the latter shows a statistically insignificant relationship with attractiveness. Turning to attractiveness and adult gaming, Chung et al. find that:
As with teens, good-looking adults are less likely than others to game, while the few adults rated as bad-looking are more likely to engage in gaming (although not significantly more so than average-looking adults)... Moving from the bad-looking 8 percent of adults to the good-looking 44 percent reduces the likelihood of gaming by over 10 percentage points, which is about 26 percent of the average incidence.
In the case of adult gaming, there are also significant effects on the intensive margin, since:
...good-looking adults who do game spend significantly less time doing it than average-looking adults, whose gaming time is, albeit insignificantly, less than that of the small group of bad-looking adults...
As at the intensive margin, the impact of differences in looks on gaming hours is substantial. Compared to bad-looking adults, good-looking adults who game spend, on average, 2.05 hours fewer doing so per week, which represents 27 percent of the mean conditional gaming time.
Next, in terms of their proposed mechanism, Chung et al. look at the effect of attractiveness on the number of reported friends, and find that:
Physically attractive/very attractive adults have about 0.4 more close friends (on a mean of 4.9) than those who are of average attractiveness. Conversely, the small fraction of those whose looks are rated unattractive/very unattractive claims about 0.7 fewer close friends than those with average attractiveness. The gap in the average number of close friends between the good- and the bad-looking is thus 22% of the overall mean.
Chung et al. also expend a good deal of effort on checking for reverse causality - that is, whether gaming reduces attractiveness. However, it does appear from their results that gaming as a teenager does not make adults less attractive, so Chung et al. are able to conclude that:
The relationship between looks and gaming does not arise because gaming makes people bad-looking: the causation appears to go from looks to gaming, not vice-versa.
Overall, if we believe the mechanism that Chung et al. propose, being more attractive raises the opportunity cost of gaming. Chung et al. note that:
...the better-looking have a higher opportunity cost of gaming as they have a comparative advantage in social interactions as an alternative leisure activity that is evidenced by more close friends.
And, as I teach in the first week of my ECONS101 and ECONS102 classes, when the opportunity cost of doing something increases, we tend to do less of it. So, attractive people game less because of their higher opportunity cost of gaming.
[HT: Marginal Revolution, last year]
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