Jennifer Bosson

University of South Florida | USF · Department of Psychology

In the present work, we addressed the relationship between parental leave policies and social norms. Using a pre‐registered, cross‐national approach, we examined the relationship between parental leave policies and the perception of social norms for the gender division of childcare. In this study, 19,259 students (11,924 women) from 48 countries in...

Collective action is a powerful tool for social change and is fundamental to women and girls’ empowerment on a societal level. Collective action towards gender equality could be understood as intentional and conscious civic behaviors focused on social transformation, questioning power relations, and promoting gender equality through collective effo...

The Towards Gender Harmony (TGH) project began in September 2018 with over 160 scholars who formed an international consortium to collect data from 62 countries across six continents. Our overarching goal was to analyze contemporary perceptions of masculinity and femininity using quantitative and qualitative methods, marking a groundbreaking effort...

Gun violence is a serious problem in the United States and elsewhere and more so among men than women. We conducted an experiment to examine if men whose masculinity was threatened are more attracted to guns than non-threatened men, presumably to compensate for the threat. After completing a gender knowledge test, men (N = 168) randomly received ei...

The cultural moderation of gender stereotypes hypothesis argues that societies assign the most culturally valued traits to men, the dominant group. Thus, in line with cultural ideals, collectivistic societies should assign men more communality, whereas individualistic societies should assign men more individualism. Using archival data, Cuddy et al....

Men, versus women, face more doubts about their heterosexuality based on a single same-gender sexual experience, a phenomenon known as the precarious sexuality effect. This phenomenon has thus far only been examined with sexually explicit same-gender acts (e.g., kissing, oral sex). Here, we conducted secondary data analyses of five large datasets o...

We propose that accounts of responsiveness and responsive listening are tailored for people with positive self-views (high self-esteem, positive self-concepts). Researchers define responsiveness, in part, as valuing and appreciating a partners' attributes, accomplishments, and worldview. This emphasis on being positively validated overlooks the dan...

Incels (involuntary celibates) have advocated for and even enacted violence against women. We explored two mechanisms that may underly incels' actions: identity fusion and self-verification. Study 1 (n = 155) revealed stronger identity fusion (deep alignment) with the ingroup among men active in online incel communities compared to men active in ot...

Despite global commitments and efforts, a gender‐based division of paid and unpaid work persists. To identify how psychological factors, national policies, and the broader sociocultural context contribute to this inequality, we assessed parental‐leave intentions in young adults (18–30 years old) planning to have children (N = 13,942; 8,880 identifi...

Social role theory posits that binary gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in less egalitarian countries, reflecting these countries’ more pronounced sex-based power divisions. Conversely, evolutionary and self-construal theorists suggest that gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in more egalitarian countries, reflec...

Cultural beliefs about the requirements of manhood may have implications for men’s physical health. In a cross-cultural examination of 62 countries, we explored whether country-level endorsement of precarious manhood beliefs (PMBs) was associated with various country-level risk-related health behaviors and outcomes. In countries that more strongly...

Relatively little is known about how gender and sexual orientation intersect to predict young adults' responses to unwanted romantic and sexual overtures from men and women suitors. To better understand these potential differences, and explore possible mechanisms that explain them, this pre-registered study used an online questionnaire to assess re...

Precarious manhood theory posits a double standard in gender rules such that prescriptions (“shoulds”) and proscriptions (“should nots”) are endorsed more strongly for men than for women. Here, we tested this hypothesis by asking whether people view agency as more desirable in men than communion is in women, and weakness as less desirable in men th...

The COVID-19 pandemic has extensively changed the state of psychological science from what research questions psychologists can ask to which methodologies psychologists can use to investigate them. In this article, we offer a perspective on how to optimize new research in the pandemic’s wake. Because this pandemic is inherently a social phenomenon—...

We tested the novel hypothesis that men lower in status-linked variables-that is, subjective social status and perceived mate value-are relatively disinclined to offset their high hostile sexism with high benevolent sexism. Findings revealed that mate value, but not social status, moderates the hostile-benevolent sexism link among men: Whereas men...

Precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action. Here, we present cross-cultural data on a brief measure of precarious manhood beliefs (the Precarious Manhood Beliefs scale [PMB]) that covaries meaningfully with other cross-culturally validated ge...

We present a model of ambivalent classism in which hostile (overtly negative and insulting) and benevolent (subjectively positive but condescending) attitudes about poor people co-exist and independently predict endorsement of restrictive and poverty-perpetuating welfare policies. Whereas existing classism scales predominantly measure antipathy tow...

Why do some heterosexual people react in a negative manner when pondering or experiencing romantic or sexual overtures from persons of their same-sex, whereas other heterosexual people react more positively? To answer this question, this cross-sectional, correlational study examined individual difference predictors of heterosexual people’s response...

We propose that feminine gay men are targets of essentialist beliefs that cast them as less natural and more entitative than masculine gay men, and that this pattern of low-naturalness/high-entitativity beliefs fuels increased sexual prejudice toward, and discomfort with, feminine gay men. Data from two studies support these hypotheses. In Study 1,...

Men sometimes withdraw support for gender equality movements when their higher gender status is threatened. Here, we expand the focus of this phenomenon by examining it cross‐culturally, to test if both individual‐ and country‐level variables predict men's collective action intentions to support gender equality. We tested a model in which men's zer...

We developed and validated a self-report scale assessing women’s daily experiences with hostile and benevolent sexism within domains of paternalism, gender differentiation, and heterosexuality. Women in two independent samples (Ns = 540 and 345) reported how frequently they experienced various hostile and benevolent forms of gender-based treatment...

This study examined the interactive effects of gender-relevant injunctive norm exposure and sexist attitudes on men's reactance, measured via activation of cognitive networks related to anger and misogyny. Heterosexual adult male students (N = 144) at a large, public university in the Southeastern United States completed measures of hostile and ben...

Women have been nascent victims of discrimination for long; exemplified in today’s contemporary society, women are heavily underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The Ambivalent Sexism theory suggests that there are two related but distinct components of sexism that portray different attitudes toward wom...

According to the psychodynamic mask model of narcissism, the narcissist's grandiose posturing masks deep-seated insecurities and low self-regard. This conceptualization of grandiose narcissism as fragile self-esteem is pursued within social-personality psychology in tests of three distinct hypotheses: the discrepant self-esteem hypothesis (narcissi...

The masculinity contest is a set of organizational norms that fosters competition, work devotion, strength, and dominance. Here, we explore pluralistic ignorance as a mechanism by which these norms persist. Pluralistic ignorance occurs when individuals privately reject a norm, but mistakenly believe others endorse it. This then discourages individu...

Given the investment in streets, it is imperative for planners and urban designers to determine what makes streets social places. Defining street liveliness as stationary social behavior and duration of stay, we present an empirical longitudinal study extending previous research findings. Using observations and visual surveys, regression analysis a...

Following threats to their gender status, heterosexual men often respond defensively by, for example, expressing more negativity toward gay men. In contrast, I-sharing—instances when people feel as though they have the same in-the-moment experience with another individual (e.g., they both cry or laugh at the same stimulus)—improves heterosexual men...

We examined associations of perceived ambivalent sexism with women’s outcomes in university Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) courses as a function of their STEM identity. Women (N = 592) who varied in STEM identification reported on their personal experiences with benevolent and hostile sexism and indicated their STEM major...

Studying the male gender role poses some unique challenges for feminist researchers. In this chapter, I use my personal experiences as a feminist and social psychologist to frame three key questions about the merits of studying men and men’s gendered experiences. These questions concern the methods, focus, and contributions of my research on precar...

The present study examined whether men view gender-atypical (i.e., feminine) psychological disorders as threats to their gender status. Men and women (N = 355) rated their expectations of gender status loss, feelings of distress, and help-seeking intentions in response to 10 different stereotypically masculine and feminine psychological disorders....

Objective Etiological models of disordered eating are limited in their consideration of racial/ethnic differences in risk factors. Appearance comparisons are consistent predictors of disordered eating outcomes, but research predominantly examines these associations among White women and overlooks the potential differential impact of upward (compari...

This study examined the interactive effects of injunctive norm exposure and hostile and benevolent sexist attitudes on men's sexually aggressive responses during a behavioral analogue paradigm in which they interacted online with a bogus female partner. Heterosexual adult men (n = 201), recruited from an online sample, read fictional information re...

Women's cardiovascular responses to sexist treatment are documented, but researchers have yet to consider these responses separately as a function of sexism type (hostile vs. benevolent). This study demonstrates distinct effects of hostile and benevolent sexism for women's cardiovascular responses that indicate increased risk for cardiovascular dis...

Honor endorsement might predict an intertwining of personal and national identities that facilitates taking country-level threats personally. If true, this could help explain why honor endorsement predicts support for defensive reactions to national provocations. In a sample of US college students (Study 1) and adults (Study 2), a latent honor vari...

Given the importance of work to the male gender role, the recent U.S. economic recession (in which men accounted for over 70 % of jobs lost; Boushey 2009) provided a window into the role of employment in men’s identities. We examined men’s and women’s beliefs about the effects of involuntary unemployment on others’ evaluations of them (i.e., metape...

Men and women who violate traditional expectations with regard to professional status are perceived negatively by others, and can face negative outcomes in the workplace. Here we examine whether these negative perceptions extend to observers’ evaluations of status violators’ intimate relationships. We employed a fictional scenario depicting a heter...

Research on minimization as a coping strategy suggests that it alleviates negative affect following threats. In contrast, research on minimization as a support-giving strategy suggests that it does more harm than good. Does this mean that minimization works when it is self-generated, but does not when it is offered by others? The present study exam...

In 5 studies (N = 756), we show that men's relative to women's gender ingroup identities are characterized by greater levels of gender dichotomization, a tendency to distance masculine from feminine traits. We demonstrate further that men's gender dichotomization is motivated, in part, by a need to eschew femininity from their ingroup identity to b...

Two studies explored gender-relevant expectations and consequences of seeking flexible work arrangements. Study 1 examined preferences and expectations of students nearing the job market. While men and women valued work flexibility and work–life balance equally, women reported greater intentions to seek flexibility in their careers. Intentions were...

In the target article, we presented the hypothesis that people around the world view manhood (more so than womanhood) as a social status that is achieved through difficult action and is easily lost. Commentators identified areas in need of clarification, critiqued the implications of our account for women, and disagreed with certain aspects of our...

Given findings suggesting that basal testosterone (T) is a biological marker of dominance striving that buffers people against stress, we examined the role of basal T in men’s stress responses (cortisol reactivity) following a private, noncompetitive gender status threat. One-hundred twenty-eight men recruited from a university in the Southeast pro...

Upon initiating relationships, people engage in a process of identity negotiation through which they establish their respective identities. Once established, people's identities define their mutual expectations, obligations, and indeed, the very nature of their relationships. This chapter presents a rudimentary theory of identity negotiation, with...

Scholars have long debated stigma's effects on the psychological functioning of its targets, with some concluding that stigma does not harm self-esteem (Crocker & Major, 198924. Crocker , J. , & Major , B. ( 1989 ). Social stigma and self-esteem: The self-protective properties of stigma . Psychological Review , 96 , 608 – 630 . [CrossRef], [Web o...

The authors report 5 studies that demonstrate that manhood, in contrast to womanhood, is seen as a precarious state requiring continual social proof and validation. Because of this precariousness, they argue that men feel especially threatened by challenges to their masculinity. Certain male-typed behaviors, such as physical aggression, may result...

The Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) has dominated research on narcissism in the field of social and personality psychology. Surprisingly, it is unclear whether the NPI is useful for identifying pathological narcissism in patients with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). The goal of this study was to close this research gap. We used an...

We surveyed Americans regarding their beliefs about gender discrimination over the past several decades. Men and women agreed that women faced much more discrimination than men in the past, and they agreed that the discrimination gap between men and women has narrowed in recent years. However, men perceived the gap as narrower than women did at all...

This article reviews evidence that manhood is seen as a precarious social status that is both difficult to achieve and tenuously held. Compared with womanhood, which is typically viewed as resulting from a natural, permanent, and biological developmental transition, manhood must be earned and maintained through publicly verifiable actions. Because...

Background and objectives: Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is characterized by reports of grandiosity including exaggerated illusions of superiority and entitlement (DSM-IV-TR, APA, 2000). Based on clinical theories (e.g., Kernberg, 1975), many researchers argue that high explicit self-esteem in narcissists masks underlying implicit vulner...

Whereas recent work on gender role violations suggests that asserting their heterosexuality may diminish the harmful effects of gender threats (versus gender affirmations) on men’s antigay reactions, predictions derived from social identity theory suggest that asserting heterosexuality can exacerbate the negative effects of a gender threat on antig...

The current studies examined the experiences of undergraduate political partisans who cross party lines to support a preferred, out-of-party candidate, and thus open themselves to the possibility of being misclassified as a member of a rival political party. Strongly identified partisans who endorsed an out-of-party candidate, and thus expected oth...

Recent work suggests that negative moral judgements of sexual activities are informed by disgust and anger. A correlational study (N=62) and an experiment (N=176) examined the specific antecedents that elicit these distinct, though correlated, moral emotions. Participants in Study 1 rated their emotional reactions to, and judgements of, 10 sexual s...

Where most accounts suggest that narcissism is characterized by exceedingly high self-esteem, zero-order correlations between narcissistic personality tendencies and global self-esteem are only moderate. Here we consider several possible reasons for the weak links between narcissism and self-esteem, and we offer directions for future research that...

Among the conjectured causes of the recent U.S. financial crisis is the hyper-masculine culture of Wall Street that promotes extreme risk-taking. In two experiments, we found that threats to their manhood motivated men to take greater financial risks and favor immediate (vs. delayed) fiscal rewards. In Experiment 1, men placed larger bets during a...

Whereas a large body of research examines the interpersonal stressors associated with revealing a stigmatized identity to others, comparatively little work documents the intrapsychic stressors associated with concealing a stigmatized identity from others. In two studies of persons with concealable stigmas (nerds in Study 1, gay men and lesbians in...

Unlike womanhood, manhood is widely viewed as a status that is elusive (it must be earned) and tenuous (it must be demonstrated repeatedly through actions). This focus on the structure—rather than the content—of gender roles can shed new light on men’s use of action and physical aggression. Here, we review theory and research connecting manhood, ac...

Holding similar negative-versus positive-attitudes toward a third party has been shown to predict increased closeness to a stranger. Here, the authors examined whether this effect is mediated by the heightened feelings of familiarity engendered by shared negative attitudes. In Study 1, participants who shared with a (bogus) stranger a negative atti...

Urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg defines a third place as a place of refuge other than the home or workplace where people can regularly visit and commune with friends, neighbors, coworkers, and even strangers. Because little is known about the place-based physical qualities of third places that support sociability and place attachment, this article...

Consistent with recent research on initials-preferences, we assumed that people's preferences for their initials reflect an implicit form of self-esteem that buffers them against challenges to their self-worth. Accordingly, we proposed that high self-esteem persons who demonstrated weak initials-preferences would be particularly likely to engage in...

Research on affective forecasting indicates that people regularly mispredict the emotional impact of negative events. We extended this work by demonstrating several forecasting errors regarding women’s affective reactions to ambivalent sexism. In response to a survey about sexism against women, students at a university in the Central U.S. (N = 188)...

The results of three experiments demonstrate that physically aggressive displays are part of men's cultural script for restoring threatened gender status. In Studies 1 and 2, challenges to men's gender status elicited heightened physically aggressive displays, including punching a pad with greater force and selecting an aggressive boxing activity o...

Two studies test the hypotheses that men, relative to women: 1) see manhood as a more elusive, impermanent state than womanhood, and 2) understand aggression as a means of proving or re-establishing threatened manhood, but not threatened womanhood. In Study 1 (N = 175 Northeastern U.S. undergraduates), men’s (but not women’s) sentence completions r...

The authors report 5 studies that demonstrate that manhood, in contrast to womanhood, is seen as a precarious state requiring continual social proof and validation. Because of this precariousness, they argue that men feel especially threatened by challenges to their masculinity. Certain male-typed behaviors, such as physical aggression, may result...

We propose that women regularly anticipate and receive messages from others that trivialize the severity of their body image concerns. Moreover, we suggest that these minimizing messages can heighten women's negative affective reactions to body image threats, particularly if they internalize them. Two studies provided support for these ideas. In St...

The links among narcissism, explicit (deliberate, controllable) self-esteem, and implicit (automatic, uncontrollable) self-esteem are unclear despite numerous attempts to illuminate these links. Some investigations suggest that narcissism reflects high explicit self-esteem that masks low implicit self-esteem, but other investigations fail to replic...

When people perform role-violating behaviors that are diagnostic of membership in a stigmatized group, they risk identity misclassification—i.e., being mistaken for a member of that group. Because false stigmatization raises the possibility of interpersonal punishment, role violators who wish to avoid it must communicate their non-stigmatized statu...

The process of identity negotiation has several components, one of which includes those self-presentation processes people perform in the service of establishing who they are. Identity negotiation cannot be equated with self-presentation, however. Self-presentational activity represents a collection of behavioral tactics designed to achieve various...

When people violate certain social role norms, they risk false categorization into a stigmatized group. For example, heterosexual men who perform female stereotypic behaviors are often misclassified as gay. This identity misclassification is aversive because it threatens fundamental psychological needs. Findings presented here reveal that expectati...

We propose that sharing a negative—as compared to a positive—attitude about a third party is particularly effective in promoting closeness between people. Findings from two survey studies and an experiment support this idea. In Studies 1 and 2, participants’ open-ended responses revealed a tendency to recall sharing with their closest friends more...

When nonstigmatized individuals enact certain role-violating behaviors, they risk becoming "falsely accused deviants" (H. S. Becker, 1963, p. 20). For instance, when heterosexual men perform stereotypically feminine behaviors, they are liable to get misclassified as homosexual. Findings presented here reveal that expectations of identity misclassif...