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How credible is the experimental evidence on precarious manhood? A z-curve analysis
Precarious manhood theory (PMT) explains men's compensatory responses to masculinity threats in domains such as affect, aggression, risk-taking, dominance, and social attitudes. While recent meta-analytic evidence suggests that masculinity threat has a small-to-medium average effect, recent preregistered replication work has failed to reproduce some influential masculinity-threat effects in a large representative sample, raising questions about which parts of the published record provide robust evidence, and which may reflect selection for significance. We conducted a field-level credibility analysis of the experimental PMT literature using z-curve, a selection model that estimates discovery and replication indicators from the distribution of reported test statistics. Across 188 independent samples contributing 452 hypothesis tests, clustered z-curve estimates indicated substantial selection for significance at the conventional 5% threshold and moderate expected replicability. Subgroup analyses suggested more favorable credibility indicators for main effects than interaction tests, for preregistered compared with non-preregistered studies, and for post-2015 work, although evidence of selective reporting remained. Affective, behavioral, and cognitive outcomes showed broadly similar selection patterns, with behavioral outcomes having the weakest evidential profile. Our analysis of the credibility of the published significant-results record suggests that interpreting past findings at a more stringent threshold of α = .01 reduces the estimated false-discovery risk below 5%, although such retrospective threshold analyses should not be read as a proposal that changing α alone would control false discoveries prospectively. Future PMT research will be most informative when theoretically specified threat–outcome hypotheses are tested in preregistered studies, supported by explicit design justification, transparent reporting, and direct or multilab replications.