Adam Stanaland

Yeah.

So we were drawing on a lot of the research with adults that has shown that these typicality threats.

So telling someone that they're not a typical man or not a typical woman can have interesting adverse consequences.

So for men, for example, if you tell an adult man, certain adult men, you're not masculine enough, they'll become aggressive to try to reassert their masculinity.

Yeah.

Women demonstrate corresponding responses for femininity.

So we didn't know when this started among children.

We have some research that I've done in the past on adolescent boys, but further down the lifespan, we weren't sure.

And then a lot of, on the other hand, with kids, a lot of the past research has been correlational.

So there hasn't been a lot of experiments done with kids to try to figure out when did they start feeling this pressure?

When did they start thinking about these things and responding to threats, typicality threats in most ways?

Yeah, so we wanted to know how kids would respond to these kinds of threats, but we wanted to do it in a way that was what we call developmentally appropriate.

So for kids, something that would make sense for them, that wouldn't threaten their psychology skills.

you know, long-term or leave lasting consequences.

And so we did borrow from the adult literature that's done some of the same things with adult men and women.

But instead we had kids play two trivia games, a boy questions game and a girl questions game.

And then we randomly gave them feedback that either said that they did really well in both games.

So boys would get, you did well in the boy game, you did well in the girl game.

Or that said, for a boy, for example, if you were in the threat condition, what we call it, then they would get feedback that said that they did really well in the girl questions game, but not so well in the boy questions game.

And so then we would briefly describe, you know, this means that you're more like other girls than like other boys, for example.