Adam Stanaland

Yeah, we did a, we weren't sure what was going to happen.

So we did like a whole battery of measures and we did some fancy statistical stuff to see how they kind of grouped together.

And so we ended up looking at their what's called their typicality enhancement.

So how much they tried to prove to us that they were like a boy.

So they would tell us how much they like things like trucks versus dolls.

And then we would look at the scores there.

Or we would even ask them if they wanted to try to replay one of the games that they had just played.

And so the extent to which a boy, for example, would try or want to replay the boy game again is an indicator to us that he's trying to prove to us that he's still masculine.

And then we also looked at how much they would avoid being atypical, so moving away from the other gender, so slightly different but nuanced.

And then their concerns about being viewed by their peers as less than, right?

So we asked them about their self-esteem in the moment.

And then we also said, if your friends found out about this, how would they respond?

How would they feel about it?

And so we got three kinds of measures and looked at different things there.

I think the answer to that is yes.

All the things you said, right?

We're not exactly sure what's going on mechanistically, but we do know from our data that all kids, regardless of their age or gender, got concerned about their feedback, right?

They became, their self-esteem lowered.

They were concerned that their friends would not like the feedback that they had gotten.

What was really interesting, though, even though that happened, was that younger girls and older boys were the ones who were specifically trying to prove behaviorally that they were typical girls or typical boys.