Exploiting and reinforcing gender stereotypes, including strengthening a sense of threat to masculinity, is one of the strategies used by anti-democratic organisations, among others, to recruit new members. MEN4DEM (Masculinity for the Future of European Democracy), a new project in Horizon Europe, aims to look at this phenomenon. The project has been awarded funding of €3 million, of which €173,000 goes to the University of Gdańsk. In addition to analysing the factors that make it easier for anti-democratic movements to recruit new people, the authors of the project plan to carry out interventions (involving theatre groups) designed to lead to de-radicalisation and counter the manipulations used by anti-democratic movements. We spoke to dr hab. Tomasz Besta, prof. UG, who directs part of the project on behalf of the University of Gdańsk, about this unique idea, which combines a scientific approach with actions of artists.
Karolina Żuk-Wieczorkiewicz: - Congratulations on winning the project. Who else besides the University of Gdańsk is involved in its implementation?
Tomasz Besta: - The leader of the consortium is the University of Amsterdam, where the management base will be. The other partners are Uppsala University, the Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences, the University of Bergamo, a scientific institution from Greece: the National Centre for Social Research, and two partner NGOs. One of these is Emancipator, an organisation working on gender equality issues. Among other things, it works with men who are being helped to get out of their crises of leaving radical groups, as well as with boys who are being targeted by radical movements. The second such partner organisation is the theatre group Via Berlin. The name is misleading, as the group comes not from Germany, but from the Netherlands. It is an international theatre collective that we will be working with and that will also come to Gdańsk to stage one ‘theatre intervention’.
- What was the main inspiration for forming such a collaboration and putting together a project on the use of gender stereotypes in politics? Was it a bottom-up initiative, perhaps a reaction to current events?
- As it is a Horizon Europe project, it was necessarily a response to a specific competition; however, at the first (familiarisation) meeting in Amsterdam, when we talked about our research areas, it formed a coherent whole, the ‘bottom-up’ nature of the initiative came out in the sense that we brought together different elements of our research. The team is mainly political science. I am the only social psychologist on it. I was invited to join the project because of my previous academic work (both in terms of political psychology and research with Natasza Kosakowska-Berezecka on gender stereotypes) and my experience in conducting quantitative research. I will therefore be responsible precisely for the evaluation component, the evaluation of experimental interventions. The other ‘teams’ will in turn deal with either large survey research in the six countries that the project covers, or qualitative research: analysis, interviews, e.g. with politicians or people who support radical movements in some way - or have just left such anti-democratic organisations and want to talk about their experience. Another element is the analysis of online content (including live content) - so we will siphon such content from social media and analyse statements appearing on forums of radical organisations (or forums where people with different anti-democratic opinions meet).
So, on the one hand, the project is about political radicalism and radical organisations (especially anti-democratic ones), and its second element is the gender aspect: how the gender issue is used by such organisations, for example to mobilise young men or to antagonise women and men. Of course, this is also a research question.
- So I understand that you represent the psychological aspect in this endeavour.
- Yes - but I am also one of those people who has a lot of experience in experimental research. So my contribution is, on the one hand, psychological analytics: the context of gender stereotypes, their consequences and how they are used to mobilise people for collective action - or to demobilise them (e.g. to pull them away from action for equality). On the other hand - since we are talking about methodology - it is the question of experimental research that will be in my scope. Incidentally, I am one of the few men in this project.
- It's quite interesting that the project is mainly aimed at young men, and it is mainly led by women.
- It is possible that more different people will be involved as performers, but the leaders are mostly women - with the exception of UG and the Emancipator organisation, where there is also a second male leader. It can be an interesting experience, since we are the only partners from Central and Eastern Europe, and I am the only psychologist in the project - and one of the few men on top of that. So I am combining several minority identities in this particular project.
- Is this relying on stereotypes, using gender stereotypes, effective? What can you conclude from your past research and observations in this area? What psychological mechanisms are used by anti-democratic groups?
- This is the question of this project, so we will be looking into it closely. However, what we know so far (e.g. from our research with Natasha Kosakowska-Berezecka) shows that the use of stereotypes has clear consequences. For example, there are men who believe more in the traditional role of men and for whom the stereotypes are stronger; additionally, they perceive masculinity as a state that has to be proven all the time (e.g. by engaging in activities that are stereotypically masculine, such as risky behaviour, etc.). In countries where this vision of masculinity is prevalent, men have more health problems, live shorter lives and generally do worse in terms of their health. There are also beliefs (linked to gender stereotypical thinking) that gender equality must lead to men having it worse. The specific name for such thinking is the belief in a zero-sum game....
- It is about the conviction that if someone loses, someone else gains, and if someone gains, someone else must lose?
- Yes. Such thinking ‘cuts out’ the area of cooperation, the view that cooperation can foster the development of different groups and lead to some added value. Stereotypical thinking about masculinity can be linked to the belief that there is competition, that if women gain, men lose. Our previous cross-cultural research shows that such thinking is strongly negatively associated with the willingness to engage in gender equality. Men who perceive the social world in this way see any action related to gender equality as a threat to themselves. In turn, this way of thinking, failing to see the synergy aspects, may lead them to explore movements that also present gender equality as something threatening.
- What does this look like in a situation of ongoing social change?
- In the context of strong transformations of society, such aroused uncertainty (e.g. how to judge the world around you? what are the new forms of behaviour? what to do to achieve your goals?) leads to a preference for choosing more radical leaders and joining more radical social groups. In our project, we will be looking at how such a relatively dynamic transformation (in terms of gender relations, emancipation, minorities) can affect the desire to join more radical groups - especially when other paths forward are not seen and when there are no other ideas on how to reduce this uncertainty. When men feel insecure, unsure of how to behave (e.g. whether or not to open the door to women), the zero-one, black-and-white vision of the world presented by radical groups may seem to them to be the easy answer. If such men do not have the right tools, prompts, other social norms to show some behaviour or what values are OK, they may try to reduce this uncertainty by joining radical organisations.
- What alternatives can be offered to such insecure men?
- It depends on many factors. Suppose someone has a belief (not necessarily an objective one, but for psychologists objectivity is not important here) that masculinity is under real threat from the increase in women's autonomy, the fact that more and more women will occupy high positions, and so on. In such a situation, the answer could be to show the benefits of equality; to make people realise that it does not just involve a loss. OK, there might be more competition in the labour market, because if half the population is excluded from a position, there are fewer people to compete with. However, if we reverse the gender stereotyping in many ways, we find that men can also benefit from gender equality. For example, contemporary movements and associations fighting for men's rights (of which there are an increasing number in Europe) point out that men are also discriminated against in many fields. One example is the issue of childcare, where gender stereotypes suggest to many that a woman will be better at raising or looking after a child. Court statistics cited by the aforementioned associations show that women are indeed preferred as primary carers (for example in divorce cases). Thus, there are areas where men clearly lose out - and they lose out precisely because gender stereotypes are dominant in society. There is a lot of talk about the negative consequences of gender inequality for women; also a lot of research has gone in this direction to show how their wellbeing and other aspects of social functioning are negatively affected by discrimination. On the other hand, it is also beginning to show that gender inequality acts as an interconnected vessel: what happens in the areas that organisations fighting for men's rights talk about is due to the same belief about the social world, which consequently leads to discrimination against one of the sexes. So this could be one element of reaching people who perceive the threat from gender equality as real.
- Can the threat be perceived in a different way?
- The second aspect is the threat of social change, in a sense ‘symbolic’: we have a belief that we can cope in our professions, but we do not agree with certain values related to emancipation or gender equality. A good example is, for example, the dispute over reproductive rights. When values are at stake, the issue is more difficult. Of course, we are talking about values that are difficult to change and very often people do not want to make any compromises here. In such a case, the solution is to show that a society in which groups may disagree, but tolerate each other and can agree with each other, is superior to a society in which one group forcibly imposes its beliefs on others. In our project, we plan to create and equip people with a package of information that could be helpful in rejecting manipulation or fake news spread by anti-democratic movements. We will be talking about different anti-democratic movements: both left-wing and right-wing, although right-wing movements currently dominate among anti-democratic movements in Europe (in the countries that participate in the project). What will we do? We plan to implement short interventions based, for example, on short films, showing the manipulative techniques, the simplifications used, the zero-sum thinking that often appears in the messages of radicals, in order to immunise people against these manipulations.
- Is this about broad education?
- Yes, these would be educational interventions (we can call them information-based). We will see if we can create tools that would at least sensitise people to the misrepresentations that appear in the campaigns or messages of radical parties and organisations. This is one of the elements we will work on. We know from other areas, e.g. research on fake news, that such interventions have been effective - e.g. in terms of sensitising people to fake news or contacting them online. Providing such a package of knowledge, simple psychological knowledge about the consequences of such black-and-white thinking, why people get into these heuristics of thinking, they like simplifications, they like stereotypes - so it's worthwhile for them to think about the complexity of a situation sometimes, though, instead of processing it in a heuristic, simplistic way - this helped to sensitise them against fake news. Researchers call this ‘mental inoculation’: we give a resource to defend ourselves against manipulation on the internet. We will try to do this in the context of using gender issues and gender stereotypes, that is, how masculinity is defined in the area of radicalisation, polarisation. This is one element on which we will try to... maybe not immediately change the attitudes of those already belonging to radical organisations, but at least sensitise people who are the target of mobilisation campaigns or attempts to recruit into such anti-democratic groups.
- Are you also planning other activities?
- Yes. The second type of intervention will be theatrical events. There is an interesting idea here to work with NGOs that work for gender equality (also fighting discrimination against men). Based on information from them, on the experiences of the men and women involved in their work, we will co-create (with the theatre group Via Berlin) a more workshop-based intervention. It will be a bit of a performance, a bit of a workshop on how different faces of masculinity can be, or how men can approach defining their role in society differently. We will also be scientifically evaluating this: the effectiveness of such longer interventions, based on performance or psychodrama. We will compare attitudes about extreme organisations before and after the intervention.
This is an interesting element of the project, on the one hand difficult for me - I'm a scientist and I don't have experience of working with artists - but it's also a nice challenge that I'm willing to take on and see what effect our collaboration will have. I will be in charge of the scientific layer - the evaluation - and Via Berlin and Emancipator will work on constructing the scenario for the intervention. We will invite different groups of men who have views similar to radical groups, but also people who have rubbed up against these groups and come out of them. Emancipator is working with different organisations from Poland; one of them is involved in the project and will work on recruitment. At the end of it, we will share our experience, ask the participants how they evaluate our performance, and we will measure the change in attitudes in a scientific way.
- I understand that measurement will be done both before and after the intervention?
- Yes, before and after the intervention. There is also a plan to do a survey among people with similar demographics who have not watched our show, and make comparisons against baseline levels of attitudes about gender equality, how masculinity is defined or direct attitudes towards anti-democratic organisations.
- What do you have planned for the start of the project?
- At the first team meeting (which will already take place in Amsterdam in January), we will try to show what we will be doing. And in the middle of the project, that is in 1.5 years' time, a big workshop will take place in Gdańsk, so we will be looking for a good place to hold it.
- So there is nothing left but to wish you good luck with the project and successful interventions. Thank you for the interview.