Risky business: Precarious manhood and investment portfolio decisions.

Abstract

The precarious manhood paradigm posits that threats to masculinity are met with attempts to reassert masculinity. We investigated the precarious manhood paradigm as applied to investment risk and foreign/domestic investment decisions. We sampled 652 men online, and tested whether threats to masculinity resulted in increases in investment risk and domestic investments in a hypothetical investment portfolio decision task. Results indicated that there was a main effect of threat for investment risk, such that those in the threat condition were willing to invest more in riskier investments. There was also an interaction with general risk-taking, such that men lower in general risk-taking responded to the threat condition by increasing investment in riskier options, while men higher in general risk-taking did not. A main effect of condition did not emerge for domestic investment, but there was an interaction, such that men lower in financial knowledge responded to the threat condition by increasing domestic investments, but men higher in financial knowledge did not. These results suggest that threats to masculinity influence financial investment decisions, and suggest that person-level variables (e.g., risk-taking, knowledge) may buffer the effects of threats to masculinity.

Educational gender gaps

“…Other fields in the social sciences and public health have extensive literatures devoted to the development of masculine and feminine identities and the behavioral implications of perceived threats to gendered identities. In social psychology in particular, the concept of fragile or precarious masculinity, in which manhood (unlike womanhood) is seen as a social state that requires continual proof and validation, has been deployed to explain gendered patterns of aggression, risk‐taking, medical care usage, and political attitudes (Courtenay, 2000; Bosson and Vandello, 2011; Parent et al ., 2018; DiMuccio and Knowles, 2020). Economics, in contrast, tends to treat male behavior as the default from which women diverge in many domains—in this case, male adolescence, in the current case, is simply “adolescence.” This viewpoint may be, to some extent, a reflection of the demographic composition of economics, but a broader willingness to examine masculinity directly will open new avenues for research and for interventions.…”

Toward an integrative psychology of masculinities.

“…Furthermore, self-ascribed and other-ascribed masculinities can interact with situational masculinities to influence people’s behavior and attitudes. Recent research has examined how individual differences in adherence to masculine norms moderate the impact of masculinity primes on attitudes and behavior (e.g., Parent et al, 2018). For instance, when their manhood was threatened, U.S. men were more likely to view a hypermasculine advertisement as masculinity-enhancing if they also conformed to the masculine norms of power over women, winning, and heterosexual self-presentation (Parent & Cooper, 2020).…”

Is Men's Heterosexuality Perceived as More Precarious than Women's? An Intersectional, Race-by-Gender Analysis

“…For example, in his book Manhood in the Making, anthropologist David Gilmore writes that in various societies, "real manhood … is not a natural condition that comes about spontaneously through biological maturation but rather is a precarious or artificial state that boys must win against powerful odds" (p. 11; as cited in Bosson et al, 2013). One such society in which men's masculinity is regarded as more precarious-or easy to lose in the eyes of perceivers-than women's femininity is that of the United States (DiMuccio & Knowles, 2021;Parent et al, 2018;. For example, in the U.S., people have an easier time making sense of the ambiguous statements "I used to be a man.…”