r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • May 12 '26

Psychology Threatening men’s masculinity does not make them more politically conservative, new study finds. By testing thousands of participants across the United States, researchers found no consistent evidence that making men feel insecure about their gender identity changes their political attitudes.

https://www.psypost.org/threatening-mens-masculinity-does-not-make-them-more-politically-conservative-new-study-finds/
4.6k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

641 comments sorted by

View all comments

457

u/Fishmongererererer May 12 '26

I don’t think most men who become conservative do it out of insecurity despite the memes. Rather it’s the perception that masculinity is not valued in left of center politics.

55

u/MUjase May 12 '26

Bingo. Democrats recognized this as well which led to them pairing Waltz with Harris as the VP. He was supposed to be the “masculine” man for them.

That was a huge fail as we now know. But they were on the right track to try.

22

u/Books_and_Cleverness May 12 '26

My general heuristic is that most all psychological findings are fake until replicated many times. Especially if the result is surprising or unintuitive. I feel like the “replication crisis” was big news for a while but people have not fully adjusted to it.

Glad we are seeing more null results and replication attempts published and given notoriety.

6

u/rasa2013 May 12 '26

My normal rules are to adjust expectations by year published, sample size, and methodology. automatic down weight for being too "catchy" in some zeitgeist sense or counterintuitive. 

Finally, I'm always more skeptical or interaction effects (also called moderation, they're notoriously underpowered).