Think like a man: affect of salient manhood threat on cognition

Research shows that manhood is a social-cultural performance. A failure to display the “proper” actions results in a failure to achieve the proper social status, i.e., not a real man. This study focused on the cognitive associates of behavior associated with re-instating manhood. I decided to test whether a salient manhood threat affects cognition in three ways: (a) by narrowing the attentional focal field, (b) by increasing the searching capacity for information on the visual field, or (c) an increase in the stimulus-driven system at the expense of the goal-oriented system, leading to an increase in compensatory strategies, in which case I would see a decrease in performance compared to men whose manhood was affirmed. While there was no significant main effect of group assignment on reaction time for either task, there was a significant interaction of block by distractor by group, indicating that group assignment affected the degree to which a man’s performance on the task improved over time. Therefore, none of the hypotheses were sufficiently proven or falsified by the current experiment. Future studies will need to be conducted in order to adequately test the hypotheses that I predicted.