The left has had a narrative, going back to the beginning of Donald Trump’s campaign, that has only intensified in the months since his election. The theory goes like this: The current president is a force so pestilential that he brings out the hate in otherwise decent people. And now they claim to have scientific proof: “Research Shows Donald Trump Is Making Men More Sexist.”
That was the headline at Vanity Fair. It was based on a press release from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school: “How Trump’s Election May Be Making Men More Aggressive.” Note that the weaselly qualifier in the Wharton headline—May Be—disappeared entirely from the Vanity Fair treatment, and “Aggressive” was replaced with the pejorative “Sexist.” Such is how windy academic speculation becomes rock-solid journalistic certitude.
But even with the “may be,” the researchers’ findings are laughably tendentious. They claim to have documented that men in the age of Trump are “acting more aggressively toward women.” This is based not on the observation of men interacting with women in the natural habitats they share—that would be mere anthropology. No, this is science of a higher order, the sort conducted under laboratory conditions.
The subjects in the average social-psychology experiment are undergraduates paid to fill out questionnaires or play games. The way the lab rats fill out their questionnaires or play their games gets quantified; those numbers get crunched and kneaded and weighted and processed until there are results that can be called statistically significant; at which point we’re told those results reveal something about the human condition. To which The Scrapbook is inclined to say, “Aw, pull the other one.”
In this case, the psych-lab kiddies were playing a standard negotiation game. A pair of students had to agree to divide up $20, but do so unevenly: One would get $15, the other $5, but who? If the two couldn’t agree, neither would get anything. Played out through the fall, the crack scientists at Wharton found that the young men, when paired with females, were more gentlemanly before the election and more “aggressive” afterwards.
Even if there were some real effect being captured—and count us skeptical given the hooey regularly labeled social-psychology findings—any number of possible explanations could be put forward. For example, which would be more plausible, that the young men of UPenn turned boorish because they were inspired by Trump’s grabby example or that in the days after the election all the snowflakes were too busy melting into puddles to play the negotiation game the way they had before?
Consider an alternative headline, “How Anti-Trump Hysteria May Be Making Some Undergraduates Timid Game-Players.” It may have (see, The Scrapbook can play the maybe game too) explanatory merit, yes, but also a fatal flaw: It wouldn’t get researchers the media attention they were seeking.
