Triggering without Deceiving—An Attempt at Designing a Non-Deceptive Male Identity Threat Treatment

Abstract

The rise of right-wing populism has been linked to threats to male identity from cultural andeconomic change. We report a survey experiment (N = 468 adult U.S. men) deploying a novel,non-deceptive treatment designed to induce male identity threat. We find no evidence thatour treatment affected the importance men attach to gender identity or downstream outcomesincluding attitudes toward transgender individuals and ethnic and partisan in- and out-groups.Either our treatment failed to threaten male identities or effects are too subtle to detect. We drawtwo lessons for experimental design: adequate statistical power and credible manipulation checksare essential for distinguishing manipulation failure from situations where data reject the theory.We discuss potential reasons for manipulation failure in our case – omitting explicit performancestandards for idealized masculine behavior and our choice of masculinity dimension – andhighlight how descriptive research can inform future non-deceptive identity threat experiments.