Self-esteem Threats Induce Aggressive Cognition Among Pressured Post-Pubertal Boys

• In Event: Behavioral Consequences of Children’s Self-esteem During Childhood

Abstract

Receiving threatening information about the self is known as self-esteem threat. In their meta-analytic review, vanDellen and colleagues (2011) found that people engage in three patterns of regulatory processes following self-esteem threat to repair damaged self-perceptions: compensation, breaking, and resistance. For example, certain men respond to perceived masculinity threats with compensatory aggression (Vandello & Bosson, 2013). Stanaland and Gaither (2021) found that younger men’s compensatory aggression was predicted by the extent to which their conformity to masculinity norms—e.g., men should be strong, tough—was motivated by conformity pressures rather than intrinsically or self-motivated.

Adolescence is a developmental period in which children are subjected to intense conformity pressures related to their gender (Cook et al., 2019). In the present study, we hypothesized that—similar to young adult men (Stanaland & Gaither, 2021)—conformity pressures to be stereotypically masculine would predict adolescent boys’ compensatory aggression following threat. Moreover, we predicted that these effects would be explained by puberty, such that only post-pubertal boys would exhibit compensatory aggressive cognition following masculinity threat. For many boys, puberty is a time when they begin to physically manifest signs of “manhood”, which may cause other people to expect them to exhibit more stereotypically masculine behavior (i.e., act like adult men) (Ge et al., 2001). Thus, we hypothesized that puberty is a development shift that brings about increased masculinity conformity pressures, which explain why and when certain boys—later, young men—exhibit compensatory aggression to threat.

Our sample comprised 206 10–14-year-old U.S.-born, English-speaking, cisgender boys (Mage = 12.26, SD = 1.28; 75.6% white). Participants reported their extrinsic motivation to engage in stereotypically masculine behavior (e.g., “I'm like other guys because I want people to like me”; Stanaland & Gaither, 2021; α = .87) and their pubertal stage (e.g., “I’ve started growing body hair”; Koopman-Verhoeff et al., 2020; α = .81). Masculinity threat was induced by randomly assigning boys to receive feedback about their masculine selves from a gender knowledge—either that they scored like other boys (no threat) or scored more like other girls than boys (threat). Aggressive cognition was assessed using a classic word-completion task, where higher proportions of words completed aggressively (versus non-aggressively) represented more aggressive thinking (e.g., Anderson & Carnagey, 2009).

Supporting our hypothesis, we found that extrinsic conformity pressures predicted post-pubertal boys’ aggressive cognition under threat, β = .10, p = .002, 95% CI [0.04, 0.17] exclusively at the latest stage of puberty, β = .08, F(1, 198) = 8.02, p = .005 but not in early or mid-puberty, ps > .10, also controlling for age. These results are presented in Figure 1 and suggest that—only after having gone through puberty and regardless of age—boys show similar compensatory pressure-threat patterns as young adult men (Stanaland & Gaither, 2021). Puberty, then, may represent a key developmental period for boys and men when pressures related to one aspect of the self—one’s masculinity—begin to elicit compensatory responses like aggression aimed at restoring self-esteem for that aspect of the self.

Authors

• Adam Stanaland, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Sarah Elizabeth Gaither, Duke Univeristy

• Anna Gassman-Pines, Duke Univeristy