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Behavioral Consequences of Sexual Orientation Disclosure in a Large-Scale Digital Environment

Enzo Brox, Riccardo Di Francesco

Abstract

Many individuals hesitate to disclose their sexual orientation, anticipating that disclosure may alter how others respond to them. At the same time, concealing one's identity can entail substantial personal and social costs. Understanding how others react to sexual orientation disclosure is therefore central to evaluating the broader consequences of coming out. This paper uses an innovative data set from a popular online video game together with a natural experiment to causally identify behavioral responses to sexual minority disclosure. We exploit exogenous variation in the identity of a playable character to identify the effects of coming out on players' revealed preferences for that character across diverse regions globally. Our findings reveal a substantial and persistent negative impact of coming out.

Behavioral Consequences of Sexual Orientation Disclosure in a Large-Scale Digital Environment

Abstract

Many individuals hesitate to disclose their sexual orientation, anticipating that disclosure may alter how others respond to them. At the same time, concealing one's identity can entail substantial personal and social costs. Understanding how others react to sexual orientation disclosure is therefore central to evaluating the broader consequences of coming out. This paper uses an innovative data set from a popular online video game together with a natural experiment to causally identify behavioral responses to sexual minority disclosure. We exploit exogenous variation in the identity of a playable character to identify the effects of coming out on players' revealed preferences for that character across diverse regions globally. Our findings reveal a substantial and persistent negative impact of coming out.
Paper Structure (29 sections, 10 equations, 25 figures, 4 tables)

This paper contains 29 sections, 10 equations, 25 figures, 4 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Context
  3. League of Legends
  4. Coming-Out Event
  5. Data
  6. Results
  7. Main Results
  8. Player Skills Heterogeneity
  9. Regional Heterogeneity
  10. Mechanisms
  11. Graves' Strength
  12. Engagement and Performance Across Usage Groups
  13. Prior Usage and Performance
  14. New Substitute Character
  15. Coming Out versus LGBT Pride Month
  16. ...and 14 more sections

Figures (25)

  • Figure 1: Google search interest over time for the query “ Graves gay." The dashed vertical line denotes the week of disclosure, and the shaded area highlights the League of Legends World Championship.
  • Figure 2: Graves' daily pick rates and synthetic control estimation results. The dashed vertical line denotes the day of disclosure, and the rainbow area highlights LGBT Pride Month.
  • Figure 4: Graves' daily pick rates and synthetic control estimation results by region. The dashed vertical line denotes the day of disclosure, and the rainbow area highlights LGBT Pride Month. Figure \ref{['fig_graves_pick_rates_regional_weights']} in Supplementary Information \ref{['app_figures_tables']} displays the identities and the contributions of the characters in the donor pool with non-zero estimated weights.
  • Figure : (a) Players below median skill
  • Figure A.I: Daily number of active players. The solid black line shows the total number of active players, while the dashed red and dotted blue lines report activity separately for players with high and low pre-treatment Graves usage, respectively. The dashed vertical line denotes the day of disclosure, and the rainbow area highlights LGBT Pride Month.
  • ...and 20 more figures