Adam Stanaland

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, 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.

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.