People would rather spend time with rich individuals who acquired their wealth through hard work than with a lottery winner, presumably because of their perceived differences in valence & competence

Cues of wealth and the subjective perception of rich people. Robin Rinn, Jonas Ludwig, Pauline Fassler & Roland Deutsch. Current Psychology, Oct 22 2022. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-022-03763-y

Abstract: These pre-registered studies shed light on the cues that individuals use to identify rich people. In two studies (N = 598), we first developed a factor-analytical model that describes the content and the mental structure of 24 wealth cues. A third within-subject study (N = 89) then assessed the perception of rich subgroups based on this model of wealth cues. Participants evaluated the extent to which the wealth cues applied to two distinct subgroups of rich people. The results show: German and US-American participants think that one can identify rich people based on the same set of cues which can be grouped along the following dimensions: luxury consumption, expensive hobbies, spontaneous spending, greedy behavior, charismatic behavior, self-presentation, and specific possessions. However, Germans and US-Americans relied on these cues to different degrees to diagnose wealth in others. Moreover, we found evidence for subgroup-specific wealth cue profiles insofar as target individuals who acquired their wealth via internal (e.g., hard work) compared to external means (e.g., lottery winners) were evaluated differently on these wealth cues, presumably because of their perceived differences in valence and competence. Together, this research provides new insights in the cognitive representation of the latent construct of wealth. Practical implications for research on the perception of affluence, and implications for political decision makers, are discussed in the last section.

General discussion

We examined the content and the structure of wealth cues, which are a part of the rich stereotype. So far, research has either asked participants to reproduce stereotypes about the rich without focusing on visible cues (e.g., Ragusa, 2015) or made a pre-selection of wealth cues (e.g., Bertram-Hümmer et al., 2015). But it remained unclear if these approaches appropriately reflect the full range of wealth cues and how these cues can be structured to aptly describe the mental representation of the latent wealth construct. Our work addressed this gap in the literature. We systematically studied wealth cues generated by participants through free association, rather than predefined attributes that qualify a person as rich. Our studies thereby added important novel insights to our understanding of the range of attributes taken to indicate wealth, and how these wealth cues are organized to form one complex cognitive representation of the social category of the rich.

First, regarding the content, the present research revealed subjective wealth cues that were rarely studied so far. To our knowledge, there are no studies that examined the role of charismatic behavior and only few that examined greedy behavior in the subjective perception of wealth in other people. One reason might be that traits in general are hard to observe and to operationalize. Greedy behavior might be overlooked, possibly because stereotypes about the rich are mainly positive (Christopher & Schlenker, 2000; Ragusa, 2015). Furthermore, we are also not aware of any study that examined the role of wasteful behavior in rich people, as indicated by the spontaneous spending dimension. Although there is one recent study that developed a ‘spending implies wealth belief scale’ (Kappes et al., 2021), our spontaneous spending dimension is more differentiated as it contains three sub-dimensions that are more specific about what individuals shall spend their money on to be identifiable as rich. Thus, contrary to earlier studies (e.g., Bertram-Hümmer & Baliki, 2015; Kappes et al., 2021; Ragusa, 2015), our research provides a validated model of various wealth cues.

Our wealth cue model also shows some parallels with earlier research regarding the content. We confirmed the prior findings that rich people are recognized by specific possessions (e.g., Bertram Hümmer et al., 2015; Ragusa, 2015). Moreover, we observed that individuals ascribed a high spending willingness (luxury consumption, expensive hobbies) to the rich, which is somewhat in line with what Maaravi and Hameiri (2019) have found in their examination of the influence of wealth cues (e.g., cars) on first offers in business negotiations. Based on their findings that wealth cues go along with high first offers, it may be concluded that individuals believe that rich people are more willing to spend than people who do not show such cues. In addition, our results further showed that rich people are also thought to have different looks because they present themselves with different symbols compared to people who are not rich (Gillath et al., 2012). And although some wealth cue dimensions do not appear to be new, or intuitively surprising, the present results allow a broader understanding of their meaning (i.e., their content) and yield possible operationalizations of the wealth cue dimensions.

Regarding the structure, our wealth cue model indicates that wealth cues cluster around latent dimensions just like stereotypes of the rich and other subgroups of the society do (Kornadt & Rothermund, 2011; Ragusa, 2015). Furthermore, the results indicate an overall latent factor that may reflect how individuals imagine how a rich person looks like. This is in line with the assumption that several directly observable cues combined serve as a lens through which it is possible to infer an underlying latent construct of wealth (Asendorpf, 2018; Brunswik, 1956). Notably however, results from a factorial invariance analysis show that although the structure of wealth cues is similar for participants in Germany and the USA, it seems that the abstract concept of what is typical for a rich person differs in both countries. We speculate that the different wealth concepts stem from different observations of conspicuous consumption behavior of rich people in Germany and the USA.

Regarding the wealth cue profiles, we found that some wealth cues are more indicative for people who acquired their wealth via internal compared to external means than other wealth cues. So far, studies that examined these subgroups of the rich (e.g., Sussman et al., 2014; Wu et al., 2018) have only investigated the likeability of those rich groups (Sussman et al., 2014), for example with the use of stereotypes from the stereotype content model (Sarkar et al., 2020; Wu et al., 2018). In contrast to this, Study 3 revealed that people relate specific behaviors and use different wealth cues to identify these rich subgroups, because the subgroups are seen as differently competent and likeable. The results revealed that wealth cues can be distinguished in their perceived valence and competence which shows that the developed wealth cues have a good predictive validity.

Limitations

The wealth cues that were generated in the Pilot Study stem from students and two experts in this research area. It is thereby possible that there could be further relevant wealth cues that were not covered through our sample and could in the future be included by asking participants from other classes of society. Moreover, our research is likely to be subject to cultural dependency (Bonn et al., 1999) because wealth cues might differ across cultures (especially within the ‘possessions’ domain), meaning that depending on the cultural background, different cues are believed to indicate that a person is rich. Furthermore, this study relied on semantic descriptions of participants and what cues they use to identify rich people. Research has shown that individuals, however, can identify affluence based on non-verbal cues that did not show up in the verbal descriptions of the participants (such as positive affect, Bjornsdottir & Rule, 2017). Thus, it seems that there are cues that are hard to verbalize but that still are used to identify the rich.

Directions for future research

Our studies provide a broader understanding of the content and the structure of wealth cues. Future research might examine whether the wealth cues that we identified here are ecologically valid cues of rich people. Brunswik’s (1956) lens model might be a framework for such research. Furthermore, we found that although the wealth cue structure was similar among two countries that share a similar living standard, there were systematic differences regarding the relative importance of individual cues. This prompts further cross-cultural research regarding the perception of wealthy people.

Furthermore, Maaravi and Hameiri (2019) showed that individuals received higher first offers in business negotiations when they were perceived being rich. Given the insights from our studies, there is now a set of cues that are related to rich people that goes beyond money and single indicators of wealth (or status), such as cars or leather-bound books. It may be an interesting avenue for future research to experimentally manipulate these wealth cues to check which of them are most important for certain behaviors related to wealthy people.

Implications

The findings of our studies are relevant for theories on the perception of wealth since they suggest that wealth cues are not ‘absolute’. That is, people differ to some extent regarding what wealth cues they deem to be indicative of richness (see e.g., the results of the pilot study), the country of origin seems to make a difference in what kind of wealth cue concept people have in mind, and wealth cues differ depending on what subgroups of rich people individuals think of. Thus, the stereotype activation and the subsequent judgement of others is not only subject to visible cues but also the context in which these cues are presented (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000).

The findings of our studies are also of practical relevance. One major implication for individuals working as legal decision makers (e.g., political decision makers or judges) is the following: Earlier research has shown that wealth triggers social expectations (e.g., Götte, 2015). Since wealth cues might be used to categorize someone being rich, individuals who display such cues are admired by others as they are also perceived as competent (Wu et al., 2018) and assumed to have desirable personality traits (Christopher & Schlenker, 2000; Leckelt et al., 2019) that lead to great social advantages. A recent paper for example, reports on a court case in the USA which involved two comparable crimes (two juveniles who drove drunk and killed pedestrians) (Weiner & Laurent, 2021). One of the two cases was committed by a poor person and the other was committed by a rich person. In both cases, the attorneys used the same defense strategy. Notably, however, the rich defendant was sentenced to only 10 years’ probation whereas the poor defendant was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment. It seems as if the presence (or absence) of wealth cues leads to certain decisions that are at risk to turn out to be unfair probably because judges ascribe more positive personality traits to rich individuals than to poorer ones. We therefore recommend that individuals who work in legal decision-making contexts should be aware of the existence of such social class stereotypes and try to counteract against them to not be at risk to make unfair decisions.

For researchers who aim to examine the perception of wealthy people, the model that we developed indicates what cues individuals use to identify rich people. Thus, there is now a set of replicated wealth cues that might help to categorize earlier research. Furthermore, these wealth cues might serve as dependent variables in future studies like we used them in our Study 3, or to measure perceived wealth without directly asking individuals how much money this person earns or how rich they are.

There are also implications for the legislative branch. As outlined above, there is no uniform definition of wealth and research demonstrates that individuals form their impression of wealth and probably wealth cues based on other people around them (Galesic et al., 2018). Thus, debates (e.g., about whom to tax) are prone to be influenced by individuals with whom a person interacts on a regular basis and not by uniform definitions. When addressing, for instance, tax or social security reform, legislators should clearly define who the rich are before they start to talk about them. Otherwise, it is likely that they disadvantage certain social classes because they base their reasoning on their own experiences or on wealth cues that might be perceived differently depending on one’s own social standing.

The negative consequences of apology gifts — Are evaluated more negatively than no or gift label, & are accepted and appreciated less, and regifted more than regular gifts

Don't tell me you are sorry with a gift: The negative consequences of apology gifts. Ilona E. De Hooge, Laura M. Straeter. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Volume 70, January 2023, 103144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2022.103144

Highlights

• Products given to apologize have different effects compared to regular gifts.

• Products with an apology label are evaluated more negatively than no or gift label.

• Apology gifts are accepted and appreciated less, and regifted more than regular gifts.

• These effects occur because apology gifts act as negative reminders.

• The findings suggest retailers to be careful with presenting products as apology gifts.

Abstract: While products are regularly presented as gifts to apologize, little is known about the effect of an apology context on product evaluations and relationships. Past research suggests that recipients positively evaluate gifts. Instead, our five studies reveal that, when recipients receive an apology gift, they evaluate the gift and the giver-recipient relationship more negatively compared to regular products, to receiving regular gifts, or towards verbal apologies. This occurs because apology gifts remind the recipient of transgressions, and signal misunderstandings of recipients’ emotions. These findings highlight the importance of the gift-giving context when promoting products as gifts.

Keywords: Gift givingApologyProduct evaluationRelationshipsMotives

8. General discussion

Usually, presenting product as gifts may positively affect product evaluations (Baumann & Hamin, 2014; Park & Yi, 2022). We demonstrate, however, that presenting products as apology gifts can negatively affect product evaluations and giver-recipient relationships. Moreover, products received as apology gifts are less accepted, and more often regifted. These negative effects occur because products given as apology gifts can act as transgression reminders, and can signal that givers misunderstand recipients’ emotions. Together, these findings suggest that giving a gift to apologize, or presenting products as gifts, may not be so beneficial after all.

8.1. Implications

Our findings reveal that the gift-giving setting in which products are presented as gifts are relevant to bear in mind. Recently, some authors have suggested that it can be valuable to include emotional aspects in retail and consumer research (Souiden et al., 2019). The current findings suggest that negative emotions or experiences, which may be unrelated to products, may still affect the product evaluation process. It may be possible that other emotional experiences that are unrelated to products, such as pride experiences after consumers have achieved something or sadness after consumers have lost something valuable, may affect their responses to products. Similarly, other gift-giving contexts or product-labels that relate to emotional experiences, such as get-well-soon gifts, farewell gifts, or consolation prizes, may also exert effects on product evaluations. Uncovering the effects of emotional experiences, gift-giving contexts, and product labels would help build a more nuanced understanding of the effects of emotional experiences on product evaluations.

The present findings also provide new insights for consumer research on gift-giving. Research has shown that emotions may affect the selection of gifts (De Hooge, 2014), and that emotions may be generated during gift receipt (Gupta et al., 2020; Ruth et al., 1999). The current research extends these findings by showing that emotional experiences prior to the gift-giving act may affect recipient responses to gifts. Moreover, while most research suggests that gift-giving has positive consequences for both product evaluations and relationships, we are one of the first to suggest that some gift-giving settings may negatively impact product evaluations and relationships. It may thus be valuable to examine whether the dynamics of other emotional gift-giving settings also negatively affect product evaluations.

The current research also adds to existing apology research. In general, apologies are perceived positively, both in interpersonal settings and in retail or service contexts (e.g., Exline et al., 2007; Honora et al., 2022; Kaleta & Mroz, 2021). Yet, apologies may have negative consequences. Recent research has shown that, in retail contexts where retailers have restricted customers, providing an apology for the restriction may generate more negative responses from customers (Luo et al., 2021). In a similar vein, we show that, although the intention may be positive, giving a gift as an apology may negatively affect customer responses. Future research proposes that retail and consumer contexts apologies may have positive versus negative effects on consumer responses.

8.2. Limitations and future research

As current studies provide evidence supporting that apology gifts can have negative consequences, there are still limitations. Gift-giving usually occurs in a complex, dynamic setting, in which the giver-recipient relationship, the gift-giving reason, and the product type presented all interact. Our research aims to examine a varied sample of gift-giving situations, which develops an idea of how apology gifts affect product evaluations and relationships. Yet, as a consequence, every study contains specific weaknesses. For example, one may wonder whether DVDs are ever actually regifted. Also, none of the studies may fully capture the interactions between giver identities, recipient identities, giver-recipient relationships, the gift-giving reason, and gift aspects. Therefore, the current studies may not capture the full scope of how apology gifts influence consumer responses.

Moreover, the current research did not provide a full mediation explanation for the effect, nor a clear overview of the relevance of individual characteristics of consumers. Our results reveal that apology gifts act as negative reminders, and as signals that givers misunderstand recipients’ emotions. The findings also show that an inadequate compensation for the hurt caused, and an obligation to reciprocate the gift do not explain the effects of apology gifts on product evaluations. We have learned that materialism does not moderate the effects of apology gifts, but other individual characteristics may matter. Additionally, our studies focused on transgressions including some emotional damage, but apology gifts may support transgressions with mostly material damage, or those which concern more experiential gifts. These could all form fruitful paths for future research.

8.3. Conclusion

Together, our findings shed light on how presenting products in a gift-giving context or with a special motive, such as to apologize for transgressions, can have negative consequences for product evaluations and for relationships. Apparently, presumably good intentions, such as making a costly apology, can tarnish recipients' views of products and relationships. Similarly, retailers’ good intentions to support apology gift giving, may negatively affect consumer responses towards their products. It may thus be wise for givers to find alternative apologizing tactics, and for retailers to rethink promoting their products as apology gifts.    

Negativity bias in the media is increasing over time (2000-2019), mostly in right-leaning news outlets

Longitudinal analysis of sentiment and emotion in news media headlines using automated labelling with Transformer language models. David Rozado ,Ruth Hughes,Jamin Halberstadt. PLOS One, October 18, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0276367

Abstract: This work describes a chronological (2000–2019) analysis of sentiment and emotion in 23 million headlines from 47 news media outlets popular in the United States. We use Transformer language models fine-tuned for detection of sentiment (positive, negative) and Ekman’s six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) plus neutral to automatically label the headlines. Results show an increase of sentiment negativity in headlines across written news media since the year 2000. Headlines from right-leaning news media have been, on average, consistently more negative than headlines from left-leaning outlets over the entire studied time period. The chronological analysis of headlines emotionality shows a growing proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness and a decrease in the prevalence of emotionally neutral headlines across the studied outlets over the 2000–2019 interval. The prevalence of headlines denoting anger appears to be higher, on average, in right-leaning news outlets than in left-leaning news media.

The chronological analysis of headlines emotionality shows a growing proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness and a decrease in the prevalence of emotionally neutral headlines across the studied outlets over the 2000–2019 interval. The prevalence of headlines denoting anger appears to be higher, on average, in right-leaning news outlets than in left-leaning news media.

Discussion

The results of this work show an increase of sentiment negativity in headlines across news media outlets popular in the United States since at least the year 2000. The sentiment of headlines in right-leaning news outlets has been, on average, more negative than the sentiment of headlines in left-leaning news outlets for the entirety of the 2000–2019 studied time interval. Also, since at least the year 2008, there has been a substantial increase in the prevalence of headlines denoting anger across popular news media outlets. Here as well, right-leaning news media appear, on average, to have used a higher proportion of anger denoting headlines than left-leaning news outlets. The prevalence of headlines denoting fear and sadness has also increased overall during the 2000–2019 interval. Within the same temporal period, the proportion of headlines with neutral emotional valence has markedly decreased across the entire news media ideological spectrum.

The higher prevalence of negativity and anger in right-leaning news media is noteworthy. Perhaps this is due to right-leaning news media simply using more negative language than left-leaning news media to describe the same phenomena. Alternatively, the higher negativity and anger undertones in headlines from right-leaning news media could be driven by differences in topic coverage between both types of outlets. Clarifying the underlying reasons for the different sentiment and emotional undertones of headlines between left-leaning and right-leaning news media could be an avenue for relevant future research.

The structural break in the sentiment polarity and the emotional payload of headlines around 2010 is intriguing, although the short nature of the time series under investigation (just 20 years of observations) makes the reliability uncertain. Due to the methodological limitations of our observational study, we can only speculate about its potential causes.

In the year 2009, social media giants Facebook and Twitter added the like and retweet buttons respectively to their platforms [33]. These features allowed those social media companies to collect information about how to capture users’ attention and maximize engagement through algorithmically determined personalized feeds. Information about which news articles diffused more profusely through social media percolated to news outlets by user-tracking systems such as browser cookies and social media virality metrics. In the early 2010s, media companies also began testing news media headlines across dozens of variations to determine the version that generated the highest click-through ratio [34]. Thus, a perverse incentive might have emerged in which news outlets, judging by the larger reach/popularity of their articles with negative/emotional headlines, started to drift towards increasing usage of negative sentiment/emotions in their headlines.

A limitation of this work is the frequent semantic overloading of the sentiment/emotion annotation task. The negative sentiment category for instance often conflates into the same umbrella notion of negativity text that describes suffering and/or being at the receiving end of mistreatment, as in “the Prime Minister has been a victim of defamation”, with text that denotes negative behavior or character traits, as in “the Prime Minister is selfish”. Thus, it is uncertain whether the increasing prevalence of headlines with negative connotations emphasize victimization, negative behavior/judgment or a mixture of the two.

An additional limitation of this work is the frequent ambiguity of the sentiment/emotion annotation task. The sentiment polarity and particularly the emotional payload of a text instance can be highly subjective and intercoder agreement is generally low, especially for the latter, albeit above chance guessing. For this reason, automated annotations for single instances of text can be noisy and thus unreliable. Yet, as shown in the simulation experiments (see S1 File for details), when aggregating the emotional payload over a large number of headlines, the average signal raises above the noise to provide a robust proxy of overall emotion in large text corpora. Reliable annotations at the individual headline level however would require more overdetermined emotional categories.

The imbalanced nature of the emotion labels also represents a challenge for the classification analysis. For that reason, we used performance metrics that are recommended when handling imbalanced data such as confusion matrices, precision, recall and F-1 scores. Usage of different algorithms such as decision trees are often recommended when working with imbalanced data. However, since Transformer models represent the state-of-the-art for NLP text classification, we circumscribed our analysis to their usage. Other techniques for dealing with imbalanced data such as oversampling the minority class or under sampling the majority class could have also been used. However, our relatively small number of human annotated headlines (1124 for sentiment and 5353 for emotion), constrained our ability to trim the human-annotated data set.

Another limitation of this work is the potential biases of the human raters that annotated the sentiment and emotion of news media headlines. It is conceivable that our sample of human raters, recruited through Mechanical Turk, is not representative of the general US population. For instance, the distribution of socioeconomic status among raters active in Mechanical Turk might not match the distribution of the entire US population. The impact of such potential sample bias on headlines sentiment/emotion estimation is uncertain.

A final limitation of our work is the small number of outlets falling into the centrist political orientation category according to the AllSides Media Bias Chart v1.1. Such small sample size limits the sample representativeness and constraints the external validity of the centrist outlets results reported here.

An important question raised by this work is whether the sentiment and emotionality embedded in news media headlines reflect a wider societal mood or if instead they just reflect the sentiment and emotionality prevalent or pushed by those creating news content. Financial incentives to maximize click-through ratios could be at play in increasing the sentiment polarity and emotional charge of headlines over time. Conceivably, the temptation of shaping the sentiment and emotional undertones of news headlines to advance political agendas could also be playing a role. Deciphering these unknowns is beyond the scope of this article and could be a worthy goal for future research.

To conclude, we hope this work paves the way for further exploration about the potential impact on public consciousness of growing emotionality and sentiment negativity of news media content and whether such trends are conductive to sustain public well-being. Thus, we hope that future research throws light on the potential psychological and social impact of public consumption of news media diets with increasingly negative sentiment and anger/fear/sadness undertones embedded within them.

Children’s self-regulation abilities are key predictors of educational success and other life outcomes such as income and health

Teaching self-regulation. Daniel Schunk, Eva M. Berger, Henning Hermes, Kirsten Winkel & Ernst Fehr. Nature Human Behaviour, October 13 2022. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01449-w

Abstract: Children’s self-regulation abilities are key predictors of educational success and other life outcomes such as income and health. However, self-regulation is not a school subject, and knowledge about how to generate lasting improvements in self-regulation and academic achievements with easily scalable, low-cost interventions is still limited. Here we report the results of a randomized controlled field study that integrates a short self-regulation teaching unit based on the concept of mental contrasting with implementation intentions into the school curriculum of first graders. We demonstrate that the treatment increases children’s skills in terms of impulse control and self-regulation while also generating lasting improvements in academic skills such as reading and monitoring careless mistakes. Moreover, it has a substantial effect on children’s long-term school career by increasing the likelihood of enroling in an advanced secondary school track three years later. Thus, self-regulation teaching can be integrated into the regular school curriculum at low cost, is easily scalable, and can substantially improve important abilities and children’s educational career path.

Across experiments, & contrary to our expectations, threat increased liberal—but not conservative—men’s preference for a wide range of aggressive political policies and behaviors (e.g., the death penalty, bombing an enemy country)

DiMuccio, Sarah, and Eric Knowles. 2022. “Something to Prove? Manhood Threats Increase Political Aggression Among Liberal Men.” PsyArXiv. October 21. doi:10.31234/osf.io/qnpw4

Abstract: Manhood is a precarious state that men seek to prove through the performance of masculine behaviors—including, at times, acts of aggression. Although correlational work has demonstrated a link between chronic masculine insecurity and political aggression (i.e., support for policies and candidates that communicate toughness and strength), experimental work on the topic is sparse. Existing studies also provide little insight into which men—liberal or conservative—are most likely to engage in political aggression after threats to their masculinity. The present work thus examines the effects of masculinity threat on liberal and conservative males’ tendency toward political aggression. We exposed liberal and conservative men to various masculinity threats, providing them with feminine feedback about their personality traits (Experiment 1), having them paint their nails (Experiment 2), and leading them to believe that they were physically weak (Experiment 3). Across experiments, and contrary to our initial expectations, threat increased liberal—but not conservative—men’s preference for a wide range of aggressive political policies and behaviors (e.g., the death penalty, bombing an enemy country). Integrative data analysis (IDA) reveals significant heterogeneity in the influence of different threats on liberal men’s political aggression—with the most effective being intimations of physical weakness. A multiverse analysis suggests that these findings are robust across a range of reasonable data-treatment and modeling choices. Possible sources of liberal men’s heightened sensitivity to manhood threat are discussed.

The Role of Ideology

The link between masculinity and conservative political ideology is well-established. In our own work, we have found that chronic masculine insecurity predicts voting for Republican presidential and congressional candidates (DiMuccio & Knowles, 2020). In other research, threats to masculinity increased men’s support for Donald Trump—an effect mediated by the desire for a highly masculine president (Carian & Sobotka, 2018). Other studies have revealed a strong link between masculinity and conservatism including robust cultural associations between “Republican” and “masculine” (Katz, 2016; M. L. McDermott, 2016; Winter, 2010) and a tendency for political conservatives to endorse traditional gender and sex-role beliefs (Feather et al., 1979; Sharrow et al., 2016). Given this link, we were surprised to find that it was liberal—not conservative—men who reacted with increased political aggression to manhood threat. We propose three potential explanations for this unexpected finding.

First, it may be that our dependent measures of political aggression (e.g., support for military intervention and the death penalty) failed to allow sufficient room for movement among conservative participants, who already strongly endorsed such positions. Indeed, we observed a ceiling effect in which 17% of our conservative male participants scored at or near the scale maximum across studies and measures (Terwee et al., 2007). This was not the case for liberal participants, who either opposed aggressive policies less (Experiments 1 and 2) or became supportive them (Experiment 3) after a threat to their manhood. Manhood threat may nonetheless cause conservative men to venture outside the range of socially-sanctioned political aggression (e.g., military intervention) into the realm of violent extremism (as exemplified the 2021 Capitol insurrection). If this is correct, then more extreme measures of political aggression would allow such an effect to emerge. By increasing the extremity of aggressive political options, researchers can allow for effects of masculinity threat to emerge among conservative men, while also shedding light on the recent rise of right-wing extremism in the U.S. (Kapur, 2021).

Second, it may be that liberal men are genuinely more vulnerable to masculinity threat in political contexts. In light of the fact that people stereotype liberals as feminine and conservatives as masculine (Katz, 2016; Rudman et al., 2013; Winter, 2010), it stands to reason that liberal men are especially eager not to exhibit feminine traits in the political realm. In other words, perhaps liberals experience stereotype threat (Spencer et al., 1999) with respect to their masculinity. In our studies, then, liberal men may have reacted to threat with heightened political aggression in order to avoid confirming a (presumably) negative stereotype of their ideological group. Suggesting that this stereotype is, in fact, negative, accusations of femininity constitute a recurring attack line against liberal politicians, presidents, and laypeople—from both the left (Dowd, 2006; Prabhu, 2016) and the right (Fahey, 2007; French, 2015). Conversely, aggression and masculinity are widely regarded as positive political qualities in American politics (Ducat, 2004; Fahey, 2007; Katz, 2016; Messner, 2007), rendering “feminized” liberal men stereotype-incongruent in political contexts (Bauer & Carpinella, 2018). Future research should further examine the possibility that liberal men experience a form of gendered stereotype threat in the realm of politics.

Research has found that liberals become more conservative in their attitudes when exposed to system threats (a phenomenon termed conservative shift; (Bonanno & Jost, 2006; Nail et al., 2009; Nail & McGregor, 2009). This raises the question of whether our findings might reflect a conservative shift among liberals rather than an increase in their political aggression per se. We believe the answer may be found in our findings regarding nonaggressive policies, such as attitudes toward Obamacare, affirmative action, and other social-welfare policies. Such stances have clear (liberal) ideological content. Thus, if masculinity threat were simply causing liberals to become more conservative, we should have observed liberals endorse such policies less under threat. We did not, however, observe any reliable effect of masculinity threat on such ideologically-laden, yet nonaggressive, attitude dimensions. We therefore believe the present findings reflect a “aggressive shift” that is not reducible to a conservative shift.

Limitations and Future Directions

This research has several limitations. First, our experiments did not include manipulation checks. We chose not to include such checks out of concern that doing so would have hinted at the true intentions of the research. This, unfortunately, means that we cannot know whether and to what extent the participants perceived each threat manipulation to challenge their masculinity. While our manipulations had face validity, future research should systematically measure the extent to which each type of manipulation employed in the present research is experienced as a threat to masculinity.

Second, our samples were disproportionately politically left-leaning. It is possible that we would have seen differences by threat across the political spectrum (and not only for left-leaning men) if we had had access to a greater number of highly conservative participants. To investigate this possibility, using the combined dataset, we plotted the estimated effects of masculinity threat on aggressive policy endorsement at every point on the conservatism scale. As can be seen in Figure S1, despite widening of the 95% confidence intervals due to the relatively small number of conservatives in the sample, there is no suggestion of a threat effect emerging at the highest levels of conservatism. Despite the lack of evidence for masculinity threat among conservatives, a definitive test awaits research that includes a large number of extremely conservative men.

Finally, our indicators of political aggression tend to be ones that conservatives endorse. This necessarily makes it difficult (though, as discussed above, not impossible) to tease apart aggressive responses from merely conservative ones. As such, future research should examine the extent to which threats might cause men to employ more aggressive methods to reach whatever their political ends may be. Perhaps, for instance, manhood threats would cause conservative men to embrace more aggressive means of passing gun rights legislation while also causing liberal men to embrace more aggressive means of passing social-welfare legislation. Such a study of political strategy (as opposed to outcomes) is a promising avenue for future investigation.

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Final version

Something to Prove? Manhood Threats Increase Political Aggression Among Liberal Men. Sarah H. DiMuccio & Eric D. Knowles. Sex Roles, Mar 10 2023. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-023-01349-x

Abstract: Manhood is a precarious state that men seek to prove through the performance of masculine behaviors—including, at times, acts of aggression. Although correlational work has demonstrated a link between chronic masculine insecurity and political aggression (i.e., support for policies and candidates that communicate toughness and strength), experimental work on the topic is sparse. Existing studies also provide little insight into which men—liberal or conservative—are most likely to display increased political aggression after threats to their masculinity. The present work thus examines the effects of masculinity threat on liberal and conservative men’s tendency toward political aggression. We exposed liberal and conservative men to various masculinity threats, providing them with feminine feedback about their personality traits (Experiment 1), having them paint their nails (Experiment 2), and leading them to believe that they were physically weak (Experiment 3). Across experiments, and contrary to our initial expectations, threat increased liberal—but not conservative—men’s preference for a wide range of aggressive political policies and behaviors (e.g., the death penalty, bombing an enemy country). Integrative data analysis (IDA) reveals significant heterogeneity in the influence of different threats on liberal men’s political aggression, the most effective of which was intimations of physical weakness. A multiverse analysis suggests that these findings are robust across a range of reasonable data-treatment and modeling choices. Possible sources of liberal men’s heightened responsiveness to manhood threats are discussed.

General Discussion

The present findings provide support for our hypothesis that threats to men’s (but not women’s) gender status leads to an increase in political aggression, defined as attitudes or behavior that communicate toughness, strength, or force. At the same time, our findings run directly counter to our initial prediction as to which men—liberals or conservatives—would be most affected by masculinity threat. Although we hypothesized that conservative men would increase in political aggression after masculinity threat, they did not; instead, across our three experiments, it was liberal men who exhibited increased political aggression after a manhood threat.

In Experiment 1, we found that a personality-based false feedback manipulation, in which men learned they possessed traits resembling that of the average woman, significantly increased liberal—but not conservative—men’s endorsement of aggressive political policies (e.g., the death penalty). Consistent with our hypotheses, gender threat had no effect on endorsement of nonaggressive policies, or on women’s endorsement of either policy type. In Experiment 2, we found that a behavioral manipulation, in which men engaged in a stereotypically feminine behavior (applying pink nail polish) increased liberal—but not conservative—men’s support for an aggressive approach to a foreign-policy dilemma. We again observed no effect of threat on men’s endorsement of nonaggressive approaches. Finally, in Experiment 3, we found that a strength-based false feedback manipulation, in which men learned their handgrips were only as strong as the average woman’s, caused liberal—but not conservative—men to become more supportive of both aggressive policies and foreign-policy strategies. Once again, manhood threat affected support for aggressive, but not nonaggressive, political policies and strategies.

While liberal men increased significantly in political aggression in all three experiments, and conservative men in none of the experiments, the difference between the threat effect for liberals and conservatives was not always significant. Specifically, ideology did not significantly moderate men’s threat-induced political aggression in Experiment 2, and did so in Experiment 3 only for vignette responses. Nonetheless, our Integrative Data Analysis (IDA; Curran & Hussong, 2009) pooling the evidence across experiments suggests a significant difference in liberals’ and conservatives’ threat responses overall. A multiverse analysis (Steegen et al., 2016) of the combined data indicated that our results are highly robust to different data-treatment and modeling choices. Taken together, then, our results tell a consistent story in which liberal men show a greater tendency to reaffirm their masculinity after manhood threats by embracing more aggressive political views.

Manhood Threats

The present research allows us to compare the relative impact of three different kinds of manhood threats on liberal men. Predictions derived from the IDA revealed that the strength-based threat manipulation in Experiment 3 produced the strongest effect on aggressive policy endorsement. This suggests that intimations of physical weakness represent an especially powerful threat to liberal men’s masculinity—and, more broadly, that the onus on men to display physical strength is highly salient in American society (Frederick et al., 2017). Our personality-based threat manipulation in Experiment 1, in which men were led to believe they possessed stereotypically feminine personalities, yielded the second-strongest effect on political aggression among liberal men. Interestingly, Experiment 2’s behavioral threat manipulation, in which men were compelled to paint their nails pink, produced the weakest threat effect. This may imply that engaging in a feminine behavior at the clear behest of an experimenter does not impugn men’s masculinity as drastically as does information that one’s personal qualities, whether physical (Experiment 3) or psychological (Experiment 1), are truly feminine. This pattern of results suggests that, in the political domain, advertising that impugns men’s physical strength, or suggests that men possess feminine personality traits, may be highly effective in shifting liberal men’s electoral and policy preferences in an aggressive direction. These results are also consistent with previous research showing that public (vs. private) threats tend to be most problematic for men (Weaver et al., 2013). In our research, the experiment that induced threat in a public space (Experiment 3) produced stronger results than threats experienced in private (Experiments 1 and 2). It is worth noting, however, that both public and private threats “worked”— suggesting that, to some extent, participants wish to demonstrate to themselves that they are adequately masculine.

The Role of Ideology

The link between masculinity and conservative political ideology is well-established. Past work has found that chronic masculine insecurity predicts voting for Republican presidential and congressional candidates (DiMuccio & Knowles, 2021). In other research, threats to masculinity increased men’s support for Donald Trump—an effect mediated by the desire for a highly masculine president (Carian & Sobotka, 2018). Other studies have revealed a strong link between masculinity and conservatism including robust cultural associations between “Republican” and “masculine” (Katz, 2016; McDermott, 2016; Winter, 2010) and a tendency for political conservatives to endorse traditional gender and sex-role beliefs (Feather et al., 1979; Sharrow et al., 2016). Given this link, we were surprised to find that it was liberal—not conservative—men who reacted with increased political aggression to manhood threat. We propose four potential explanations for this unexpected finding.

First, it may be that our dependent measures of political aggression (e.g., support for military intervention and the death penalty) failed to allow sufficient room for movement among conservative participants, who already strongly endorsed such positions. Indeed, we observed a ceiling effect in which 17% of our conservative male participants scored at or near the scale maximum across studies and measures (Terwee et al., 2007). This was not the case for liberal participants, who either opposed aggressive policies less (Experiments 1 and 2) or became supportive them (Experiment 3) after a threat to their manhood. Manhood threat may nonetheless cause conservative men to venture outside the range of socially-sanctioned political aggression (e.g., military intervention) into the realm of violent extremism (as exemplified the 2021 Capitol insurrection). If this is correct, then more extreme measures of political aggression would allow such an effect to emerge. By increasing the extremity of aggressive political options, researchers can allow for effects of masculinity threat to emerge among conservative men, while also shedding light on the recent rise of right-wing extremism in the U.S. (Kapur, 2021).

Second, it is possible that, compared to liberals, conservatives are higher in chronic concern for masculinity—and that this blunts the impact of transient threat inductions on their political attitudes. If this is the case, then the effects of masculinity threat may already be “baked in” to conservative men’s political attitudes. Future research should carefully parse out the effects of, and interactions between, trait vs. state levels of masculine insecurity.

Third, it may be that liberal men are genuinely more vulnerable to masculinity threats in political contexts. In light of the fact that people stereotype liberals as feminine and conservatives as masculine (Katz, 2016; Rudman et al., 2013; Winter, 2010), it stands to reason that many liberal men are especially eager not to exhibit feminine traits in the political realm. In other words, perhaps liberals experience stereotype threat (Spencer et al., 1999) with respect to their masculinity. In our studies, then, liberal men may have reacted to threat with heightened political aggression in order to avoid confirming a (presumably) negative stereotype of their ideological group. Suggesting that this stereotype is, in fact, negative, accusations of femininity constitute a recurring attack line against liberal politicians, presidents, and laypeople—from both the left (Dowd, 2006; Prabhu, 2016) and the right (Fahey, 2007; French, 2015). Conversely, aggression and masculinity are widely regarded as positive political qualities in American politics (Ducat, 2004; Fahey, 2007; Katz, 2016; Messner, 2007), rendering “feminized” liberal men stereotype-incongruent in political contexts (Bauer & Carpinella, 2018). Future research should further examine the possibility that liberal men experience a form of gendered stereotype threat in the realm of politics.

Fourth, research has found that liberals become more conservative in their attitudes when exposed to system threats (a phenomenon termed conservative shift; Bonanno & Jost, 2006; Nail et al., 2009; Nail & McGregor, 2009). This raises the question of whether our findings might reflect a conservative shift among liberals rather than an increase in their political aggression per se. We believe the answer may be found in our findings regarding nonaggressive policies, such as attitudes toward Obamacare, affirmative action, and other social-welfare policies. Such stances have clear (liberal) ideological content. Thus, if masculinity threat were simply causing liberals to become more conservative, we should have observed liberals endorse such policies less under threat. We did not, however, observe any reliable effect of masculinity threat on such ideologically laden, yet nonaggressive, attitude dimensions. We therefore believe the present findings reflect a “aggressive shift” that is not reducible to a conservative shift.

We see another possible—though more speculative—explanation for the fact that masculinity threat increased political aggression more among liberals than among conservatives. Specifically, it may be that liberals and conservatives are distinguished by a differential tendency to repair masculinity in public vs. private contexts. If conservatives only see the utility of performing reparative behaviors in public, while liberals engage in such behaviors in public or private, it might explain liberals’ relatively large threat-induced increase in political aggression in the present experiments. Indeed, two of three studies (Experiments 1 and 2) measured political aggression in private, laboratory contexts. Only Experiment 3 was conducted in a public space (a park), and perhaps not coincidentally produced the largest threat effects among conservative men. Although we know of no data or theory that specifically suggests a public–private distinction along ideological lines, little is known about factors that make public vs. private performance of manhood preferable. (We thank one of our reviewers for raising these issues.)

We wish to caution that, while our masculinity threats increased political aggression only among relatively liberal men, threat failed to close the gap between liberals’ and conservatives’ overall levels of political aggression. Indeed, conservatives displayed consistently and drastically stronger support for aggressive policies and vignette responses. This could be due to people’s longstanding ideological affinities, as aggressive political policies tend to be more conservative than nonaggressive policies. Despite these caveats, political liberals’ heightened susceptibility to messages that impugn their masculinity suggests that left-leaning men should be vigilant against attempts to manipulate their politics through such means.

Limitations and Future Directions

This research has several limitations. First, our experiments did not include manipulation checks. We chose not to include such checks out of concern that doing so would have hinted at the true intentions of the research. This, unfortunately, means that we cannot know whether and to what extent the participants perceived each threat manipulation to challenge their masculinity. While our manipulations had face validity, future research should systematically measure the extent to which each type of manipulation employed in the present research is experienced as a threat to masculinity.

Second, our samples were disproportionately politically left-leaning. It is possible that we would have seen differences by threat across the political spectrum (and not only for left-leaning men) if we had had access to a greater number of highly conservative participants. To investigate this possibility, using the combined dataset, we plotted the estimated effects of masculinity threat on aggressive policy endorsement at every point on the conservatism scale. As can be seen in Figure S1, despite widening of the 95% confidence intervals due to the relatively small number of conservatives in the sample, there is no suggestion of a threat effect emerging at the highest levels of conservatism. Despite the lack of evidence for masculinity threat among conservatives, a definitive test awaits research that includes a large number of extremely conservative men.

Finally, our indicators of political aggression tend to be ones that conservatives endorse. This necessarily makes it difficult (though, as discussed above, not impossible) to tease apart aggressive responses from merely conservative ones. As such, future research should examine the extent to which threats might cause men to employ more aggressive methods to reach whatever their political ends may be. Perhaps, for instance, manhood threats would cause conservative men to embrace more aggressive means of passing gun rights legislation while also causing liberal men to embrace more aggressive means of passing social-welfare legislation. Such a study of political strategy (as opposed to outcomes) is a promising avenue for future investigation.

Personality and hardiness differences between Norwegian police and psychology students: Police students are nicer

Personality and hardiness differences between Norwegian police and psychology students. Tom Hilding Skoglund, Patrick Risan, Rebecca Milne. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, October 13 2022. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjop.12877

Abstract: The present study investigated: (1) differences in personality traits and hardiness between police and psychology students; and (2) the relationship between personality traits and hardiness. To achieve these aims, we obtained scores using the Big Five Inventory-20 and the Dispositional Resilience Scale-15-R from n = 125 police students and n = 177 psychology students. Police students relative to psychology students, as expected, scored significantly higher on extraversion, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, and lower on openness. Further, the police students scored higher than psychology students on agreeableness, which was unexpected. For hardiness, police students also scored significantly higher than the psychology students. There was, however, no significant difference for the hardiness component of control. All Big Five traits (except agreeableness) predicted hardiness in a stepwise regression, where emotional stability was the strongest isolated predictor (β = 0.40). When treating hardiness as a dichotomized variable, for identifying those especially low or high on hardiness, openness was the strongest predictor for the high hardiness group: OR = 1.69 (95% CI 1.24–2.30). Margin plots revealed that increases in Big Five trait scores, except agreeableness, elevated the probability of belonging to the high hardiness group independent of field of study. We conclude that there is some support for a Norwegian ‘police student personality’. Additionally, we discuss nuances in the personality-relatedness of the hardiness construct based on results from a linear and logistic regression, respectively.