Dr John Barry

Highly cited social psychology finding, implying that men respond to a masculinity threat by adopting more conservative political attitudes, goes down the drain in thorough, large scale replication attempt. Do men respond to a masculinity threat by adopting more conservative political attitudes? A highly cited study by Willer et al. – drawing on substantial work in social psychology – argues in the affirmative, reasoning that endorsing conservative views allows men to reaffirm their gender identity. In two experiments with student convenience samples, the authors find consistent evidence: inducing masculinity threat increases support for war, homophobic attitudes, and endorsement of dominance hierarchies. We conduct a preregistered replication of this foundational study using a nationally representative probability sample (N total 2774). We find that Willer et al.’s (main results do not hold in our replication: we do not observe that masculinity threat is associated with increased support for war, homophobic attitudes, support for dominance hierarchies, traditionalism, or other conservative attitudes. We further do not find support for design differences between the replication and original study driving contrasting findings. Our results call into question the robustness of evidence linking masculinity threat to political attitudes and underscore the importance of re-evaluating widely accepted findings with representative, large samples.