Dangerous pop psychology fun, decided I just gotta post it:

By Eric Knowles and Sarah DiMuccio​ @ WashingtonPost.com, November 29

[....] For example, sociologist Robb Willer has shown that men whose sense of masculinity was threatened increased their support for aggressive foreign policy [....]

[....] We could not simply do a poll of men, who might not honestly answer questions about their deepest insecurities. Instead we relied on Google Trends, which measures the popularity of Google search terms [....] We began by selecting a set of search topics that we believed might be especially common among men concerned about living up to the ideals of manhood: “erectile dysfunction,” “hair loss,” “how to get girls,” “penis enlargement,” “penis size,” “steroids,” “testosterone” and “Viagra.” [....]

[....] How fragile masculinity was related to voting behavior

We measured the popularity of these search topics in every media market in the country during the years preceding the past three presidential elections. In the map below, darker colors show where these searches were most prevalent in 2016.

[MAP ILLUSTRATION]

We found that support for Trump in the 2016 election was higher in areas that had more searches for topics such as “erectile dysfunction.” Moreover, this relationship persisted after accounting for demographic attributes in media markets, such as education levels and racial composition, as well as searches for topics unrelated to fragile masculinity, such as “breast augmentation” and “menopause.”

In contrast, fragile masculinity was not associated with support for Mitt Romney in 2012 or support for John McCain in 2008 — suggesting that the correlation of fragile masculinity and voting in presidential elections was distinctively stronger in 2016.

The same finding emerged in 2018. We estimated levels of fragile masculinity in every U.S. congressional district based on levels in the media markets with which districts overlap. Before the election, we preregisteredour expectations, including the other factors that we would account for.

In the more than 390 House elections pitting a Republican candidate against a Democratic candidate [....]