Replication Study Finds No Evidence That Masculinity Threat Drives Conservative Politics

Masculinity threat theory posits that men view their gender status as fragile and may overcompensate with aggressive or conservative attitudes when challenged. A 2013 lab experiment reported that men told they scored in the feminine range expressed greater support for Iraq War, anti-LGBT positions, and social dominance. The replication, titled “A Replication and Extension of Willer et al. (2013), Overdoing Gender: A Test of the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis,” was published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science and sought to verify the findings.

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The experiment recruited 2,774 U.S. adults (2,073 men) via a panel. Participants were randomly assigned to four conditions: deceptive feminine feedback, altered feedback, a knowledge threat, and control feedback. The study was led by Claire Gothreau, a postdoctoral researcher at the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College, and Nicholas Haas, funded by NSF Experiments in the Social Sciences grant.

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Men who received feminine-score feedback did not show increased support for Iraq War, anti-LGBT policies, vehicle preferences, traditionalism, system justification/social dominance, transgender rights, immigration, marijuana legalization, or preferential hiring for women. The null results also held for other threat conditions, indicating gender threat did not shift attitudes in a nationally representative online sample.

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Claire Gothreau said the team entered the study ambivalently and the null result did not surprise her. She noted design differences—timing, measurement tools, and sample composition—could explain the failure to replicate findings. Gothreau cautioned against concluding masculinity threat is irrelevant to politics.

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Sarah DiMuccio, Eric Knowles, Brian Harrison, and Melissa Michelson have linked masculinity threat to support for death penalty, military aggression, and hostility toward transgender people, mixed evidence. The 2013 study found heightened conservative attitudes after gender-threat feedback; replication found none. Gaps include moving from face-to-face labs to an online survey, lessening impact, and differences.

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Gothreau plans to investigate the “masculinity gap”—the discrepancy between self-perceived masculinity and ideal masculinity—and to examine how this gap relates to political extremism, grievance politics, and anti-egalitarian attitudes in NSF-supported research.

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• “Given the current cultural conversation around masculinity and the so-called ‘masculinity crisis,’ it felt like an especially important moment to revisit and rigorously test these claims,” — Claire Gothreau, Postdoctoral Researcher

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• “We really went into this being completely ambivalent about what the results would be, so I would say no, nothing surprised me about our results!” — Claire Gothreau

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• “One potential misinterpretation would be concluding that ‘masculinity threat has no relevance to politics,'” — Claire Gothreau

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• “A failed replication doesn’t necessarily mean the original findings were ‘wrong.'” — Claire Gothreau

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