Male Pattern Blindness: The Consequences of Defending Manhood

Research on threats to masculine gender identity reveals that they occur in a diversity of contexts. In conjunction with research on the content of masculine identity, there is converging evidence that manhood is seen as a status that men must work hard to earn and maintain (Vandello, Bosson, Cohen, Burnaford, & Weaver, 2008). In the defense of claims to manhood, men often perform behavior that restores their sense of masculinity in the short term, but has harmful future consequences for themselves and the people around them. While there is a growing body of work demonstrating this relationship, there is less known about why masculinity operates this way. Specifically, what aspects of the defense of masculinity lead men to ignore the harmful future consequences of their actions? Could it be that the precarious nature of masculinity motivates men to focus on the immediate contexts where their masculinity is threatened, and to ignore the future consequences of how they respond? Four studies tested this hypothesis. Study 1 examines whether the precarious nature of masculinity provokes a focus on immediate responses to threats, lest one's hard fought claim to manhood be lost. Relative to men whose gender identity was validated, men experiencing masculinity threats became less concerned with the future consequences of their behavior relative to their concerned with the immediate context. In contrast, women experiencing gender identity threats did not become more focused on their immediate context. Study 2 examined whether or not the precariousness of masculine identity is unique. Here I provide evidence that, relative to other social identities, masculinity is unique in that it is both highly valued and viewed as precarious. Study 3 tests directly whether or not the precariousness of masculinity is driving the reduction in focus on the future consequences of men's behavior. Here, I demonstrate that threatening an equally valued, but less precarious social identity (family identity) fails to reproduce decrements in men's focus on the future consequences of their behavior. This study demonstrates that it is the combination of the high value and high precariousness of a social identity--and not masculinity itself--that leads to a reduced focus on the consequences of men's responses to a threatened social identity. Finally, Study 4 demonstrates that reframing masculinity as a less precarious status can effectively attenuate men's myopic focus when their masculine identity is threatened