The tendency to feel hostility or hatred towards women is called “misogyny.”
Researchers at the University of Bergen in Norway recently looked at the characteristics of men who are more likely to be misogynists and how they relate to their own assessment of attractiveness.
As a result, it was found that the two most aggressive types of men towards women were those who overestimate themselves and think, “I’m cool,” and those who, at the other extreme, underestimate themselves and think, “I’m just a loner.”
Other characteristics that make people more susceptible to misogyny have also been identified.
What are the characteristics of men who are prone to misogyny?
Misogyny is a negative tendency to feel hostility, hatred, contempt, and prejudice toward women.
This leads to discriminatory and unequal practices that unfairly devalue women and restrict or prevent them from participating in society .
Furthermore, in individual cases, there is a risk that this could develop into verbal or physical violence or sexual assault against a particular woman, which is considered extremely problematic.
(By the way, the tendency to feel hostility or hatred towards men is called “misandry.” )
So a psychology research team at the University of Bergen set out to uncover in more detail the characteristics of men who are prone to misogyny .
The survey items chosen included authoritarian personality type*, which has previously been linked to misogyny, as well as self-evaluation of attractiveness, sensitivity to rejection, and feelings of loneliness.
(※ Authoritarianism: Refers to the attitude of individuals or societies that act on the basis of authority or blindly submit to old traditions.)
The study involved 473 healthy men aged 18 to 35 (average age 26) living in the UK .
The participants were recruited through Prolific, an online platform that helps collect academic research data, and were paid £8 (approximately 1,500 yen) to take part.
Participants then completed a series of questionnaires measuring levels of authoritarianism, self-rated attractiveness, sensitivity to rejection, and misogyny.
The results showed that authoritarianism was most strongly associated with misogyny.
Participants with more authoritarian personality traits were more likely to display misogynistic and sexist traits .
This is likely because authoritarians cling to outdated ideas about strict social hierarchies and gender roles.
On the other hand, although not as strongly authoritarian, men who are more sensitive to rejection also tend to have negative attitudes toward women.
It is speculated that this may be related to the fact that the shock of being rejected when approaching a woman can turn into hostility or hatred toward women.
But the most notable finding was the intriguing association between self-attractiveness ratings and misogyny.
To put it simply, men who are overly confident in themselves, such as “I’m the coolest guy!” or “The world revolves around me,” and men who overly underestimate themselves, such as “I’m no good at anything I do” or “I’m just a secondary character in life,” are more likely to feel hostility or hatred towards women.
The researchers explain the psychological process that leads men with such extreme self-evaluations to become aggressive toward women as follows:
First of all , men who overestimate themselves tend to have excessive narcissistic tendencies and are more likely to adopt a dominant attitude because they overestimate their own abilities. They also want to be dominant in relationships, which can lead to hostile attitudes toward women .
On the other hand, men who underestimate themselves underestimate their own attractiveness and abilities, and so they become frustrated when they can’t reach women, thinking, “It won’t work out anyway, even if I ask them out,” and this dark psychology is thought to turn into hostility and aggression.
These results are the first to demonstrate that men who rate their own attractiveness at the extremes are more likely to harbor misogynistic tendencies.
However, the team cautioned that this study “only included British men, so the findings may not necessarily be representative of men of other ethnicities.”
The team therefore plans to continue their research in cultural regions other than the UK.
It’s also important to understand that this report only indicates a trend, and does not mean that any man who meets certain criteria will be hostile towards women.
Men with more extreme self-evaluations are more likely to feel hostility toward women
As the name suggests, self-attractiveness assessment is an assessment of how attractive and positively you perceive your own personality and behavioral traits.
In the study, the 473 participants were asked to rank their self-assessment of attractiveness on the horizontal axis from lowest to highest, and their level of misogyny on the vertical axis from lowest to highest, and the relationship between the two was examined.
Interestingly, then , misogynistic men were at the two extremes of the scale: those who most overestimated their own attractiveness and those who most underestimated it .