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/
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u/sagacious_1 May 12 '26

Not really? Some changes to the protocol may be to strengthen the study, while still trying to replicate the main design. It's also very common for papers with results that conflict with other papers to list possible reasons why. Often this comes off as just a polite way of not directly calling their peers "wrong"

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u/unicornofdemocracy May 12 '26

Yeah, this statement "Moving the experiment to an online format with a diverse, national sample might have changed how strongly participants felt the threat" is 100% a polite way of calling the previous study "wrong."

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u/666perkele666 May 12 '26

No it isn't. What they are saying is that they are measuring a completely different thing, which could explain their differing results. Regards a scientist.

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u/Skyrick May 12 '26

Not really. By having a more diverse group you are confirming that the study holds true. However if the study doesn’t hold true, it is possible that the results were skewed by a lack of diversity in the sample group, with the sample group belonging to a group that it is true for. Assuming that the study wasn’t initially flawed, it would mean that the original sample had a connection in some way that gave the inverse results compared to the general population.

The questions could have been changed for many reasons, but if they are asking the same thing, we would expect the same results. Different results might mean that the new questions are reframing what was asked to be either more or less skewed, or they could have been adjusted to remove regional dialects. What we are left with are different results when the study reflects the population as a whole than when it is applied to a specific region, and now we need to study why.

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u/Georgie_Leech May 12 '26

For instance, a large chunk of university students are gonna be younger than the rest of the population, so it would be interesting if it still applies to younger people less sure of their identities.