Precarious Manhood and Its Effects on Aggression: The Role of Cultural Script

Abstract

The present study tests the precariousness of manhood and the impact of precarious manhood on aggression. In total, 50 undergraduates (25 girls, 25 boys) participated in this experiment. It was found that the male participants used more verbs in the “A man should__” sentence string than in the “One woman should__” sentence string, and similar language patterns were found even after controlling for gender stereotypes. Individuals were found to more often attribute the individual behavior caused by cultural scripts to external situational factors; that is, if individuals agreed that another male’s aggression was due to threatened manhood, this behavior was seen to be because of the male cultural script and was due to external circumstances. To test this view, a total of 56 college students participated in this experiment. In total, 25 college students (11 males, 14 females) took part in the attribution evaluation of two male fighters, and 31 college students (15 males, 16 females) participated in the attribution evaluation of two female fighters. It was found that the male participants believed that other male physical aggression that threatened their manhood was induced by situational factors rather than the internal characteristics of the attacker. The differences between the female participants were not significant, indicating that it was part of the male cultural script for men (rather than women) to defend or restore precarious manhood through aggression.

Keywords

precarious manhood physical aggression gender stereotype cultural script

Introduction

When faced with career or family problems, men have often been found to condemn themselves with comments such as “I am not a real man,” suggesting that manhood may seem precarious to many men; However, if a woman says “I am not a real woman,” it is usually when she has lost some part of her physicality, such as after a mastectomy or hysterectomy (Vandello, Bosson, Cohen, Burnaford, & Weaver, 2008). In many cultures, womanhood is defined as a permanent, stable part of identity and is not subject to loss due to a violation of gender norms (Levant, 2011). In contrast, the cultural definition of manhood is fleeting, elusive, and subject to loss through gender norm violations. When young, boys learn that they can only attain manhood by continually reaffirming to others that they have the qualities society defines as necessary for “being a man” (Heinrich, 2013).

Because manhood seems precarious for men or when their manhood is threatened, they may try to prove their worth in a variety of ways or take various actions. Many studies have shown that physical aggression is an effective strategy for the protection of manhood (Bosson, Vandello, Burnaford, Weaver, & Arzu Wasti, 2009; Kalish & Kimmel, 2010; J. R. Weaver, Vandello, Bosson, & Burnaford, 2010), with men believing that physical aggression in the face of a threat is a culturally acceptable response (Bosson & Vandello, 2011). Miller, Zeichner, and Wilson (2012) suggested that as men tend to see physical aggression as a part of their cultural script when seeking to defend or restore their precarious manhood, they use physical aggression much more frequently than women.

In addition, as face and favor are important parts of Chinese culture (Kim, Cohen, & Au, 2010) in which people “gain,” “claim,” and “give face” to others, the primary focus is to avoid losing face (Hamamura, Meijer, Heine, Kamaya, & Hori, 2009). Therefore, an individual’s self-worth in a face-oriented culture such as China is socially conferred by the judgment of others rather than by individual perceptions (Kim & Cohen, 2010; Kim et al., 2010). In comparison, people from Western cultures (e.g., American) are less likely to endorse face logic, and instead, prioritize internal information and resist being defined by others (Kim et al., 2010). Therefore, exploring how men in a face-oriented culture perceive their manhood is important. Furthermore, as people in a Chinese cultural context are more likely to avoid direct conflict and more carefully adhere to formalities to save their own and others’ face (Leung & Cohen, 2011), does precarious manhood in Chinese culture also result in aggressive male behavior because of cultural scripting as has been found in Western cultures?

Precarious Manhood

Masculinity is defined as the enactment of gender roles, that is, the “patterns of behavior that are culturally expected of ‘normal’ men” (Brehm, Miller, Perlman, & Campbell, 1992). Therefore, behaviors that violate this gender role may be perceived as threats to manhood (Fleming, Lee, & Dworkin, 2014). Vandello et al. (2008) proposed a precarious manhood theory (PMT) that had three subordinate theoretical assumptions, the first of which was that manhood was a social status that must be earned or achieved; that is, unlike womanhood, manhood is socially constructed rather than biologically determined (Levant, 2011). Gilmore (1990) conducted a global anthropological investigation into manhood and found that it was widely believed that “men were created and not born” in preindustrial cultures, which was embodied in various adult rituals that celebrated the transition from boyhood to manhood. Vandello et al.’s (2008) second assumption was that manhood can be lost; for example, American college students were found to believe that men could lose their manhood as a result of social defects such as losing a job or an inability to support the family; however, these participants had difficulty saying how women could lose their womanhood and could only offer physical explanations such as “Uterine resections” or “transsexual surgery” rather than any social reasons (Vandello et al., 2008). Vandello et al.’s (2008) third assumption was that manhood required a public demonstration; that is, as the status of their masculinity is seen as elusive and tenuous, this causes anxiety, so to alleviate this gender-based anxiety, men attempt to demonstrate and restore their masculinity not only for themselves but also for others (Kalish & Kimmel, 2010). For example, O’Connor, Ford, and Banos (2017) found that men who scored higher in precarious manhood beliefs (PMB) found sexist and anti-gay humor to be amusing as a way to reaffirm their masculinity.

In sum, prior research on manhood has tended to find manhood to be a vital commodity. Gender roles to some extent are social rules that tell individuals what behavior is expected of them because of their biological gender (Connell, 2012), and some symbolic capital rewards are given if people conform to these rules (Bourdieu, 1989). Therefore, as masculine capital is one form of symbolic capital that can be accumulated or lost through behavior, many studies have found that men act to accumulate and maintain their manhood (de Visser & McDonnell, 2013; Fleming et al., 2014; Vandello & Bosson, 2013).

Therefore, given the above assumptions, precarious manhood as a contextual variable can lead to important behavioral changes, with some research having suggested that men may respond to precarious manhood by accentuating the differences between masculinity and femininity (Bosson & Michniewicz, 2013; Glick, Wilkerson, & Cuffe, 2015; Hunt, Fasoli, Carnaghi, & Cadinu, 2016). For example, Hunt et al. (2016) found that gay men showed less willingness to communicate with a feminine gay man due to a fear of being misclassified as such, and identified more with a masculine gay man after being subjected to this type of gender threat. Also, men whose manhood was threatened have been found to discriminate against those who violate gender norms (K. S. Weaver & Vescio, 2015). For example, Kroeper, Sanchez, and Himmelstein (2014) found that a precarious manhood predicted a lower rate of confronting sexual prejudice and less negative responses to an interaction partner, which suggested that being tolerant to discrimination was used to assert masculinity.

In general, the structural characteristics of male gender roles indicate that manhood is precarious because it is difficult to obtain and easy to lose. In contrast, women do not need to acquire or prove womanhood and the status of a “true woman” is not questioned even if her behavior damages her or her family’s reputation.

Precarious Manhood and Aggression

The precariousness of manhood explains why men have been found to be generally more physically aggressive than women. Although studies have shown there are a variety of ways men can prove their manhood (Becker & Barreto, 2014), Bosson et al. (2009) argued that successful men tended to take three main actions to prove or restore their manhood: risk-taking (symbol of fearlessness), attempting difficult tasks to achieve action (hard to fake or fake at a high cost), and public displays (visible to others). For these reasons, physical aggression has been found to be a common means of proving manhood, especially when manhood is threatened (Vandello & Bosson, 2013). Research has found that men often use physical aggression to save “face” and defend their honor after their manhood is threatened (Miner & Smittick, 2016). Therefore, feelings of precarious manhood may activate cultural scripts in which physical aggression is used to maintain and/or restore manhood (Kimmel & Mahler, 2003; Malamuth, Linz, Heavey, Barnes, & Acker, 1995). If so, gender threats may activate more aggressive cognition in males than in females, which is consistent with the general Attack Model (Anderson & Bushman, 2002), which suggests that negative emotions activate the cognitive structures associated with aggression.

To test this view, Vandello et al. (2008) manipulated the gender status feelings of the participants by giving them false feedback, after which the participants completed nine-word stem tasks. It was found that the males who had felt that their gender was being threatened completed the stems with more aggressive words than the males from the gender enhancement condition. In contrast, the feedback from the females was not found to affect female aggressive cognition, which suggested that challenges to gender identification only stimulated male thoughts of physical aggression. If a threat to manhood activates a physically aggressive cognition in males, does it evoke actual aggressive behavior? To this end, Bosson et al. (2009) asked one group of male participants to complete a female gender stereotypical hair-braiding task that could threaten their male gender identification, and asked another group of male participants to make ropes, a gender neutral task. It was found that more men from the hair-braiding task chose to hit sandbags (rather than to guess riddles) than the males who had been making ropes, the males who had performed the hair-braiding task hit the mat harder than the men who had conducted the rope weaving task, and the men who hit the mats after the hair-braiding task had a lower level of anxiety than the men who were not allowed to hit the mats after the hair-braiding task. Braly, Parent, and DeLucia (2018) also found that in response to threats to their masculinity, men might act to reassert their masculinity through aggressive driving responses, and it was concluded that threats to manhood could evoke increased aggressive cognition and behavior.

Although physical aggression is often effective in proving masculinity, it is largely unacceptable in many cultural settings, especially in those that prohibit fighting. In such situations, in response to threats to their masculinity, men may engage in symbolic aggression rather than physical aggression, such as using words and other nonverbal behavior (e.g., facial or body gestures, tone of voice) to dominate or defeat someone (Rancer & Avtgis, 2006). Netchaeva, Kouchaki, and Sheppard (2015) found that men showed greater symbolic aggression by more assertive counter offers when negotiating with a female manager, which was more a response to feelings of their manhood being threatened rather than a motivation to penalize the female manager for breaking gender norms. In addition, direct physical aggression has been found to be replaced with financial risks as a permitted and effective way to prove manhood. Parent, Kalenkoski, and Cardella (2017) argued that threats to masculinity predicted a greater involvement in riskier investments and person-level variables (e.g., risk-taking, knowledge) to buffer any threats to masculinity. Charness and Gneezy (2012) also found that males were more likely to take greater financial risks than females, and that a pursuit of manhood (rather than womanhood) increased the possibility of financial adventures (J. R. Weaver, Vandello, & Bosson, 2013).

The Role of Cultural Script

Social script theory states that people follow internal scripts when constructing meaning out of behavior, responses, and emotions (Wiederman, 2015). Social scripts are social and cultural norms or intrapsychic maps that provide guidance on how to feel, think, and behave in particular situations (Wiederman, 2005). Research has argued that physical aggression in response to a threat appears to be culturally acceptable to men (Bosson & Vandello, 2011; J. R. Weaver et al., 2010), especially in hegemonic, dominantly masculine cultures in which physical aggression is encouraged when there are threats to masculinity (Kalish & Kimmel, 2010). O’Connor et al. (2017) claimed that encouraging aggression in male social and cultural scripts was not only a way to prove their masculine identity but also a way to confirm it to others, as men were given a sense of entitlement through their social norms to use aggression. J. R. Weaver et al. (2010) found that male participants perceived the aggression perpetrated by a man as an acceptable response to a situation whereas women did not, indicating that physical aggression may be part of male (but not female) cultural scripts in response to threats.

Cultural scripts provide guidance and reduce anxiety by decreasing uncertainty (Wiederman, 2005). Research has found that physical aggression to prove manhood can mitigate the anxiety produced by gender threats (Bosson et al., 2009). Berke, Reidy, Miller, and Zeichner (2017) found that gender threats elicited male aggression and that gender-threatened men had a higher pain tolerance than their nonthreatened counterparts, which suggested that the ability to endure pain could be a socially expressive function to quell negative affect. Men who had a stronger masculine identity were also found to tolerate discrimination against gay men and to minimize the severity of discriminatory acts perpetrated against gay men (K. S. Weaver & Vescio, 2015). In short, the masculine stereotypical behavior implicit in cultural scripts tends to affirm manhood and relieve any negative affect for men whose manhood is threatened.

Experiment 1—Precarious Manhood

As male aggressive behavior may be a response to perceived threats to manhood, people (especially males) may believe that manhood needs to be actively demonstrated. In Experiment 1, the precariousness of manhood was investigated based on the paradigm reported in J. R. Weaver et al. (2010). Participants were asked to complete an open-ended sentence string—“A man/woman should__”—so as to explore the perceived relationships between manhood and action. If the participants felt that manhood was precarious and needed to be maintained, it was expected that they would complete the sentence string with action words such as “A man should be able to repair cars” rather than with stable qualities such as “A man should be handy.” On the contrary, if womanhood were seen to be relatively stable, it was expected that the sentence string would be completed with lasting intrinsic qualities rather than actions. To test these suppositions, participants completed sentence strings for “A man/woman should__,” after which the actions that involved more verbs (the content of doing things) and the characteristics that involved more adjectives (the way of doing things) were encoded.

However, these sentence string completions may have only reflected the automatic activation of gender stereotypes about male actions and female communal behaviors (Basow & Martin, 2013) rather than beliefs about precarious manhood; that is, the participants may have used descriptions that involved actions and activities for the sentence string “A man should__” because these actions and activities coincided with their stereotypical beliefs about manhood rather than because they believed their manhood needed to be proved. Therefore, to control for the possible effects of gender stereotyping, responses that reflected gender stereotypes were excluded as a covariate in the statistical analysis. In summary,

Hypothesis 1: Males (rather than females) complete a sentence string “A man should __” with more action words than when completing a sentence string “A woman should __.”

Method

Participants and procedures

In total, 50 undergraduates (25 males) from Sichuan Normal University, 19 to 23 years old, with the mean age of 22.5 years (SD = 6.83 years) were selected through random sampling for the experiment. The experiment was conducted in classrooms, and all participants were given a reward at the end of the experiment.

A 2 (gender: male, female) x 2 (item: A man should ____, A woman should ___) two factor mixed experimental design was adopted, with the average number of sentences that contained a verb being taken as the index for the dependent variable. Participants completed a questionnaire that had 20 randomized search string items: 10 for “A man should __” and 10 for “A woman should __.” Because gender was the subject factor, it was difficult to allocate the subjects randomly; therefore, participants’ age and educational level differences were controlled for to reduce the differences between the groups. To control for stereotypical content, the stereotypical content was evaluated and included as a covariate but excluded from the statistical analyses.

Language coding

Two scorers (neither of whom were informed of the purpose of the study) encoded all completed sentences on two dimensions: verbs that involved actual actions (e. g., A man should be able to repair a car; A woman should be able to cook a meal) and adjectives that involved personal characteristics (e.g., A man should be respectable; A woman should be kind). They first calculated the total number of sentences that reflected the content of the action, and then calculated the total number of sentences that reflected the enduring characteristics that involved adjectives that described stable personal qualities. High consistency was found between the two scorers (90% for the number of verbs and 88% for the adjectives). Any disagreements were judged by the third rater.

Stereotypical evaluation

As the initial participant responses were expected to be related to automatic stereotypical views (Devine, 1989), the method in J. R. Weaver et al. (2010) was employed. As an individual’s gender stereotype is an automatic process without conscious control, the first few sentences participants completed were thought to be the most affected by gender stereotype; therefore, the rater (who was not told the purpose of the study) was asked to evaluate the first three sentences of each participant questionnaire and score each from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very much) based on the extent that they reflected the “stereotypes of manhood” or the “stereotypes of womanhood.” The composite manhood stereotype score was determined by averaging the rater’s manhood stereotype scoring across the first three sentence completions and the composite womanhood score was determined by averaging the rater’s womanhood ratings across the same three sentence completions. For example, the rater, respectively, scored the first six sentences 2, 2, 4, 2, 3, and 4 for a participant’s answers “A man should play sports,” “A man should be strong,” “A man should support his family,” and “A woman should be clean,” “A woman should be kind,” “A woman should keep house”; therefore, the final stereotype score was 2.67 for “stereotypes of manhood” and 3 for “stereotypes of womanhood.” To ensure scoring reliability, a second rater assessed the subset of all the sentences completed by the subjects (33%). The internal consistency reliability between the two raters was alpha = .75 for the stereotypical manhood content and alpha = .64 for the stereotypical womanhood content.

Results

Total responses

Altogether, the 50 participants completed 1,000 sentences (500 “A man should __” and 500 “A woman should __”). As the raters extracted the first three items from each participant, there were a total of 156 sentences, 78 on manhood and 78 on womanhood for the stereotypical content analysis.

Stereotypical content

The stereotypical manhood and womanhood content was analyzed, and it was found that the sentences “A man should __” had significantly more stereotypical content (M = 3.4, SD = 1.35) than the sentences “A woman should __” (M = 2.87, SD = 2.87), with the difference reaching a significant level, t(77) = 2.53, p < .05, which indicated that for both male and female participants, the manhood stereotypical content had a greater number of verbs than the womanhood stereotypical content. Significant gender differences were also observed in the stereotypical manhood and womanhood content, with the male participants (M = 10.09, SD = 2.03) having significantly more stereotypical beliefs about manhood and womanhood than the female participants (M = 8.44, SD = 2.87), t(48) = 2.06, p < .05 (see Table 1).

Table 1.

A Descriptive Statistic of the Number of Sentences Containing the Verb.

Different Types of Items	Gender	Average	SD
“A man should __”	Male	6.94	0.85
“A man should __”	Female	5.68	1.387
“A woman should __”	Male	3.69	1.58
“A woman should __”	Female	5.97	1.507

The variance analysis showed that the main effect for the participant gender independent variable on the dependent variable (the number of sentences with a verb included in the sentence) was not significant (see Table 2), F(1, 48) = 2.879, p = .096. However, both the main effect of the different items type independent variable on the dependent variable, F(1, 48) = 35.639, p < .0005, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .341, and the interaction between the gender of the participants and the different item types were found to be significant, F(1, 48) = 35.639, p < .0005, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .426. Figure 1 shows the interaction between the variables for participant gender and the different item types.

Table 2.

Analysis of Variance Between Gender and Different Types of Items.

Variation Sources	Sum of Squares	df	M ²	F
Gender	5.683	1	5.683	2.879
Different types of items	47.531	1	47.531	24.791***
Gender × Different types of items	68.331	48	68.331	35.639***
Within-group error
Errors within the subjects	94.757	48	1.974
Residual error	92.029	48	1.917

Note. df = degree of freedom.

***

p < .005.

Figure 1.

The interaction between genders and different types of items.

The simple effect analysis showed that for the male participants, the number of sentences containing a verb was significantly different at different levels for item type, F(1, 24) = 51.735, p < .0005, and that the average number of verbs used to complete the sentence “A man should __” (M = 6.94) was significantly higher than the average number of verbs used in the sentence “A woman should __” (M = 3.69). For the female participants, the number of sentences containing verbs was not significantly different at different levels for item type, F(1, 24) = 0.719, p = .403. The results of the simple effect analysis did not change when the stereotypical content was excluded, with the respective p values being .02 and .624.

Experiment 2—Precarious Manhood and Aggression

On the basis of Experiment 1, the main purpose of Experiment 2 was to explore whether male physical aggression to protect impaired manhood was part of the male cultural script. People tend to attribute the behavior of others to external situational factors or internal characteristics. A situational attribution reflects an inclination to consider the aggression of strangers as behavior triggered by a cultural script, whereas an internal personality attribution reflects an inclination to consider the stranger’s behavior a result of internal factors rather than environmental factors (Jones & Davis, 1965). Therefore, if men become aggressive due to threatened manhood as part of a male cultural script that sees males as more sensitive than females to physical attacks, men interpret the physical aggression of other males as an external situational factor because of a challenge to their gender identity. Accordingly, the hypothesis for Experiment 2 was as follows:

Hypothesis 2: Male participants attribute the aggression of other males to external situational factors rather than internal characteristic factors, relative to all other conditions (female participants evaluate the aggression of other females, male participants evaluate the aggression of other females, and female participants evaluate the aggression of other males).

Method

Participants

In total, 56 college students aged 19 to 24 years with a mean age of 22.6 years (SD = 6.55 years) were selected from Sichuan Normal University for the experiment using random sampling: 25 (11 males, 14 females) for the attribution evaluation of two male fighters, and 31 (15 males, 16 females) for the attribution evaluation of two female fighters. All experiments were conducted in classrooms, and all participants were given a reward at the end of the experiment.

Experimental materials and factor analysis

Questionnaires were used as the experimental materials. The first half of the questionnaire was a detailed report of a fight incident: a summary of the incident and victim and perpetrator statements taken after the incident. The report stated that the perpetrator had been talking to a person of the opposite gender at a bar when the victim pushed in between the two. When the perpetrator protested, the victim openly questioned the perpetrator’s ability to attract the other gendered person. Many people witnessed the scene and used various words to incite the perpetrator, who then punched the victim in the face and kicked him (her) in the stomach after he (she) fell (see Appendix 1 for the full scenario).

The second half of the questionnaire had eight items focused on behavior attribution; after the participants read the detailed fight incident report, they were required to rate the extent to which the attacker’s behavior was attributable to eight different causes (1 = not at all, 7 = a great deal), four of which were external situational factors and four of which were internal characteristic factors (J. R. Weaver et al., 2010; Appendix 2).

Before testing the research hypothesis, it was necessary to estimate the reliability and validity of the eight attribution items. Principal component analysis and orthogonal rotation were used to extract the communal factors; two factors with initial eigenvalues greater than 1 were extracted, with the cumulative explanatory rate of variance being 57.47%, and the external situational and internal characteristic factor explanatory rates being, respectively, 34.519% and 22.951%. The reliability analyses determined the total internal consistency reliability for the eight items to be alpha = .698, with the internal consistency reliabilities for the situational attribution dimension and the characteristic attribution dimension, respectively, being .758 and .617, which indicated that the attributional evaluation questionnaire had good reliability and validity.

Procedures

A 2 (gender: male, female) x 2 (gender of the fighters: male and male, female and female) x 2 (attribution type: dispositional attribution, situational attribution) experimental design was adopted, with the attribution ratings being the dependent variable index. To conceal the real purpose of the experiment from participants, the questionnaires were titled “Criminal Justice Study.” The questionnaires had two different versions of the fight incidents: one between two males and one between two females. To ensure a random distribution of these different versions, the questionnaires were shuffled before being randomly distributed to each participant. The two questionnaires were identical except for the gender of the fighters in the incident recount. As Experiment 1 had gender as a subject factor, it was difficult to allocate the subjects randomly. Therefore, the participants’ differences in age and educational level were controlled for to reduce the differences between the groups.

Test of common method bias

As Experiment 2 used questionnaires, because of the same data source or raters, the same measurement environment, or items that had their own characteristics, there may have been some artificial covariation or common method bias between the predictive variables and the outcome variables (Zhou & Long, 2004). As the common method bias was unknown, Harman’s univariate test method was applied (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, & Podsakoff, 2012). A nonrotating exploratory factor analysis was used to extract two common factors; the variance contribution of the first common factor was 28.30% and no more than 40%, indicating that there was no serious common method bias in the questionnaire used in Experiment 2.

Results

It was found that the main effects for participant gender, fighter gender, and attribution type were not significant, respectively, F(1, 52) = 2.148, p > .05, F(1, 52) = 0.183, p > .05, F(1, 52) = 0.47, p > .05, and the double interactions between participant gender and fighter gender, participant gender and attribution type, and fighter gender and attribution type were also not significant, respectively, F(1, 52) = 1.5, p > .05, F(1, 52) = 2.131, p > .05, F(1, 52) = 1.129, p > .05; however, the triple interactions between participant gender, fighter gender, and attribution type were found to be significant, F(1, 52) = 4.615, p < .05, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .082. The descriptive statistics and variance analysis for the relevant variables are shown in Tables 3 and 4, and Figures 2 and 3.

Table 3.

The Descriptive Statistics of Participants’ Genders, Fighters’ Genders, and Attribution Types.

Attributional Types	Participants’ Genders	Fighters’ Genders	Average	SD
Dispositional attribution	Male	Male and male	3.91	1.13
	Male	Female and female	4.64	0.90
	Female	Male and male	5.05	0.88
	Female	Female and female	4.56	0.88
Situational attribution	Male	Male and male	5.89	1.19
	Male	Female and female	4.44	0.85
	Female	Male and male	4.71	0.63
	Female	Female and female	4.56	0.85

Table 4.

The Variance Analysis of Participants’ Genders, Fighters’ Genders and Attribution Types.

Variation Sources	Sum of Squares	df	Mean Square	F
Participants’ genders	1.76	1	1.76	2.148
Fighters’ genders	0.15	1	0.15	0.183
Attributional types	0.393	1	0.393	0.47
Participants’ genders × Fighters’ genders	1.229	1	1.229	1.5
Attributional types × Participants’ genders	1.779	1	1.779	2.131
Attributional types × Fighters’ genders	0.943	1	0.943	1.129
Participants’ genders × Fighters’ genders × Attributional types	3.854	1	3.854	4.615*
Within-group error
Errors between the subjects	21.302	52	0.41
Residual error	42.604	52	0.819

p < .05.

Figure 2.

The interaction of male participants, fighters’ genders, and attributional types.

Figure 3.

The interaction of female participants, fighters’ genders, and attributional types.

The simple and simple effect analyses for the male participants found significant differences for attribution type (dispositional attribution and situational attribution) between the two male fighters, F(1, 52) = 6.29, p < .05, with the external situational attribution for the two male fighters’ behavior being significantly higher than the internal characteristic attribution. The male participants’ attribution differences for the two female fighters’ behavior, the female participants’ attribution differences for the two male fighters’ behavior, and the female participants’ attribution differences for the two female fighters’ behavior were, respectively, F(1, 52) = 0.2, p > .05, F(1, 52) = 0.96, p > .05, and F(1, 52) = 0.04, p > .05. The detailed results are shown in Table 5.

Table 5.

The Simple and Simple Effects of Attribution Types on Different Participants Genders and Different Fighters’ Genders.

Variation Sources		Sum of Square		df		M ²		F		p
Participants’ Genders		M	F	M	F	M	F	M	F	M	F
Fighters’ genders	M and M	5.25	0.81	1	1	5.25	0.81	6.29	0.96	.015	.33
Fighters’ genders	F and F	0.17	0.04	1	1	0.17	0.04	0.2	0.04	.654	.837

Note. M = male; F = Female; df = degree of freedom.

Discussion

This study explored precarious manhood in Chinese culture and its effects on aggression and found conclusions that were similar to those in Western research (J. R. Weaver et al., 2010), thereby providing across cultural evidence for precarious manhood and aggression. As predicted in hypothesis 1, the male participants completed the sentence string “A man should __” with a greater number of verbs than for the sentence string “A woman should __”; however, the differences in the number of verbs was not significant for the female participants. After controlling for gender stereotyping, the male participants were found to have a similar language pattern, which suggested that the results in Experiment 1 were not all motivated by stereotypical opinion but were because the males felt that manhood was precarious and needed to be proved, which was consistent with the findings in Bosson and Vandello (2011).

First, manhood, unlike womanhood, is not based on biological designation. Biologically, females have reproductive value; however, a male’s reproductive value is very cheap and can be easily replaced. Second, compared with womanhood, manhood has been found to be a social construct (Bosson et al., 2009) and therefore can be lost if others refuse to confer it. Chinese culture in particular is characterized by a dependent self-construal; therefore, when conducting self-evaluation, Chinese tend to emphasize the relationship between the self and others based on the standards of others (Cross, Hardin, & Gercek-Swing, 2011), which also means that manhood is difficult to achieve and easy to lose. Therefore, this study provided evidence that precarious manhood exists across different cultures.

As also found in J. R. Weaver et al. (2010), only the male participants in this study thought manhood was precarious; however, these results were not consistent with Vandello et al. (2008), which found that both males and females perceived manhood as precarious. These inconsistent results may be related to the different measurement methods used by Vandello et al. (2008) which measured the precariousness of manhood using mainly direct measurement methods, whereas in the present study and Weaver et al.’s research, indirect measurement methods were adopted to determine the intrinsic beliefs of the participants about precarious manhood; that is, the precariousness of manhood was mainly measured in terms of structure. Although both male and female participants agreed with the explicit statements about precarious manhood, the beliefs about the instability of masculinity for the male participants may have been affected by the participants’ spontaneous social perceptions.

When explaining the unexpected or unwelcome behavior of others, the participants assumed that this behavior reflected mainly personality traits rather than the circumstances (Jones & Davis, 1965). However, this typical attribution bias was not shown when the male participants perceived the other male physical aggression in public to be a threat to his manhood. Therefore, in accordance with hypothesis 2, the male participants were found to believe that the physical aggression of other men occurred because of the situation rather than because of the intrinsic characteristics of the attacker, especially when manhood was being threatened. These findings were consistent with the notion that demonstrating or restoring unstable gender identities was part of the male cultural script.

It has been observed that aggression may play the role of impression management; that is, males consider physical aggression to be a way of “saving face” following a direct threat (Felson, 1982; Vandello & Cohen, 2003). The findings in this study supported the logic that men sometimes considered aggression as a way to protect their threatened manhood and that this logic was extended beyond a male’s individual aggressive tendencies to explain other male aggression. Although Chinese generally tend to avoid direct conflict and adhere to formalities to save their own and others’ face (Leung & Cohen, 2011), the primary focus is to avoid losing their own face (Hamamura et al., 2009). Therefore, it is understandable that Chinese males may attribute the aggression of other males to situational factors to protect their threatened manhood.

However, the aggression was not attributed to external situational factors in the female participants’ evaluation of the aggression of other males, the male participants’ evaluation of the aggression of other females, and the female participants’ evaluation of the aggression of other females, which was consistent with hypothesis 2. It was confirmed in Experiment 1 that the female participants did not perceive manhood to be precarious, indicating that the female participants did not think that it was necessary to repeatedly prove manhood and that physical aggression was not a feasible way to protect threatened manhood. In addition, as proven in Experiment 1, womanhood was considered stable. It has been widely confirmed that women are less likely to use physical aggression than men (Card, Stucky, Sawalani, & Little, 2008), which suggests that any physically aggressive act committed by a woman would be viewed as odd regardless of the context in which it occurs.

Implications

This study explored the precarious manhood and aggression among Chinese college students. It can provide a reference for interventions to reduce negative male behavior of this group. This laboratory model for precarious manhood supported the theory that males who feel sexually threatened engage in stereotypical behavior such as aggression to protect their manhood, may be very sensitive to negative affect arousal, and tend to adopt ineffective strategies to resolve these experiences. As such, interventions that challenge the norms of “real men” and bolster the skills for managing challenging emotions and situational stressors may be important in reducing negative male behavior.

On the other side, this study examined Chinese college students, aged 19 to 24 years, who have higher education level and more rational way of thinking relative to other groups in China. Using the special group only, the conclusion of this study may not be able to generalize other groups in China, such as those with lower level of education. And people of different ages may experience different gender role discrepancies. Older men, for example, may be less sensitive to gender threats (Wills & DePaulo, 1991). In addition, the conclusion of this study cannot be directly applied to Western groups who hold individualist values due to the lack of cross-cultural comparison between China and the West.

Limitations and Future Directions

Although the results of this study gave a new perspective on the understanding of Chinese male aggressive behavior, there were some limitations. First, as mentioned earlier, our sample is Chinese college students, aged 19 to 24 years, the conclusion in this study cannot be generalized to groups with different ages or cultures. To address this possible sample bias and further explore the general relationships among precarious manhood, action, and aggressive behavior, future research can conduct cross-cultural or comparative studies on middle aged or older men. Second, the experimental materials used in this study only examined the propensity for physical aggression; however, women have been found to use relational types of aggression rather than direct physical aggression when their womanhood is threatened (J. R. Weaver et al., 2010). Therefore, if the experimental material content in this study were modified toward relationship aggression, the female evaluations of the other female aggressive behavior may have been more inclined to attribute the actions to the external situation. Therefore, future research could focus on the types of aggression that may pose a threat to womanhood.

Footnotes

Appendix A

“Criminal Justice Study”: Scenario from Study 2

Note: Participants saw what appeared to be an actual Florida State Domestic Incident Report, which had been completed in handwriting and which described a confrontation at an Orlando bar between two men or between two women.

Appendix B

Items that involved external situational factors:

Items that involved internal characteristic factors:

Authors’ Note

Yuchang Jin and Cuicui Sun has contributed equally to the study.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research is supported by Chinese National Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 71673032) and National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 15BSH025). We appreciated these supports both in finance and in spirit.

Author Biographies

Yuchang Jin is a professor in School of Teacher Education and Psychology, Sichuan Normal University. His research interests include gender, bullying, trauma, video games, and social identity.

Cuicui Sun is a PhD student in School of Psychology, Central China Normal University. She is interested in gender research.

Junxiu An is a professor in College of Software Engineering, Chengdu University of Information Technology. His research interests include social computing, bullying, and social identity.

Jing Wu is a PhD student at the Department of Psychology, Capital Normal University. She is interested in bullying and school violence.

Junyi Li is a second-year PhD student in School of Psychology, Central China Normal University. He is also a joint PhD student in Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in bullying and video games.

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