The idea that men become more politically conservative when their masculinity is challenged has long been treated as established fact in psychology and social science. A new large-scale study now casts serious doubt on this assumption, finding no reliable evidence that triggering a sense of masculinity threat shifts men towards more right-wing or aggressive political attitudes. The findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science.
The original claim came from a widely cited 2013 study by Willer and colleagues, published in the American Journal of Sociology. That research used small groups of university students and found that when men received feedback suggesting they scored in a feminine range on a personality test, they became more supportive of war, more hostile towards gay rights, and more drawn to symbols of male dominance such as large vehicles. These findings were influential in debates about masculinity, far-right politics, and the psychology of gender identity.
The new replication, conducted by researchers at Dartmouth College and Aarhus University, tested the same theory using a nationally representative sample of nearly 2,800 American adults. Participants completed the same personality inventory used in the original study and were randomly assigned to receive feedback suggesting either a masculine or feminine score, regardless of their actual responses. Researchers then measured their political attitudes across a range of topics.
Contrary to the original findings, the replication found no consistent shift in political views among men who received the gender-threatening feedback. Support for war, attitudes towards immigration, views on dominance hierarchies, and opinions on transgender rights all remained essentially unchanged. The pattern held across different versions of the experiment, including a modified condition designed to make the feedback feel more plausible.
The researchers also explored whether the null results could be explained by outdated outcome measures. Given that the original study used attitudes towards the Iraq War and opposition to gay rights, which have since shifted considerably in American public opinion, the replication team introduced updated questions on transgender rights, immigration, and affirmative action policies. Even with these contemporary measures, no significant effect of masculinity threat emerged.
One possible exception was a slight reduction in support for gender-based affirmative action among men who received the masculinity-threatening feedback, but this effect did not survive statistical corrections for multiple comparisons and cannot be treated as a robust finding.
The authors acknowledge they cannot entirely rule out that differences in study design, such as the shift from an in-person laboratory setting to an online survey conducted two decades later, may have played some role. However, they argue that even if design factors contributed to the contrasting results, this would itself suggest that any link between masculinity threat and political attitudes is fragile and context-dependent rather than a reliable psychological mechanism.
The study raises important questions about how research on precarious manhood and conservative political attitudes has been interpreted and communicated. With growing public and political interest in the so-called crisis of masculinity, findings like these serve as a reminder that even widely accepted psychological conclusions require scrutiny when tested under more rigorous conditions.
