Men with a less modest view of themselves tend to feel that men as a group are unfairly disadvantaged compared to women. This sense of victimhood predicts a greater willingness to support and participate in men’s rights activism, according to new research. The findings were published in Personality and Individual Differences.
To understand this connection, it helps to look at two psychological concepts at the center of the research: trait modesty and group-based relative deprivation. Trait modesty refers to how people evaluate themselves in relation to others. People with high trait modesty generally view themselves as being no better than anyone else. On the other hand, people with low trait modesty tend to feel superior and entitled to special privileges, viewing themselves as better than those around them. This shapes how they interpret situations involving social comparisons.
Group-based relative deprivation is the perception that a person’s own group is being unfairly treated or disadvantaged compared to other groups in society. This feeling often triggers anger and resentment. To experience it, an individual has to compare their group to another, appraise their group as disadvantaged, and view that disadvantage as unjust. In the context of gender, it captures a sense that men are losing power or status they are rightfully entitled to.
Researchers have increasingly documented how men adopt a sense of victimhood and how entitlement fuels backlash against gender equality. For example, a 2021 study indicated that many people now believe sexism primarily targets men rather than women, capturing a core grievance of the men’s rights movement. Building on this idea, a 2022 study showed how men in the men’s rights movement construct a sense of victimhood to build a collective identity that justifies their protests and organizing.
Adding to this picture, a 2024 study provided evidence that male entitlement predicts a willingness to engage in both peaceful and aggressive actions to defend men’s societal status. Similarly, research covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that traits like narcissism and psychopathy were associated with lower support for feminist attitudes.
The new research, led by Joanna Lindström, a psychology researcher at Uppsala University, and Morgana Lizzio-Wilson, a lecturer in social, political, and feminist psychology at the University of Exeter, sought to pinpoint whether low modesty is a specific personality trait linked to these feelings of unfair deprivation and a willingness to engage in men’s rights activism.
“I was initially interested in understanding why some (but not all) members of structurally advantaged groups perceive that their group is unjustly disadvantaged, despite statistics and history suggesting otherwise,” Lindström told PsyPost. “This led me to show that low modesty was linked to feeling deprived among men (but not women), and among White Americans (but not Black Americans),” she explained, referring to a previous study she conducted. “We then wanted to examine whether modesty and feeling deprived as a man could also explain men’s willingness to engage in men’s rights activism.”
The researchers tested this idea in two separate stages. In the first study, the team recruited 195 White American men through an online platform. The participants completed a standardized personality questionnaire designed to measure trait modesty. They also answered a series of questions measuring group-based relative deprivation, indicating how frustrated they felt about men being supposedly disadvantaged in modern society.
Next, the researchers measured the participants’ support for and intention to engage in men’s rights activism. They separated these potential actions into two distinct categories. Conventional political actions included activities accepted within a social system, like advocating for law reform or joining a men’s rights organization. Extreme or non-traditional actions included behaviors that deviate from societal norms, like participating in a protest that might turn violent or supporting those who use physical aggression for the cause.
The team found that men with lower trait modesty were more likely to report feeling that men are an oppressed group. This feeling of deprivation, in turn, predicted higher support for both peaceful and extreme activism. Deprivation was a stronger predictor of conventional activism, while having low modesty itself was a stronger predictor of a willingness to engage in extreme, non-traditional activism. The results suggest an indirect pathway: low modesty leads to a heightened sense of relative deprivation, which then fuels a desire to engage in activism.
“Aspects of men’s personality and perceptions of social context both have a role to play in shaping men’s support for men’s rights activism,” Lindström said. “That is, trait modesty predicts how men appraise their treatment as a group in society more generally, which, in turn influences whether they support and want to personally engage in actions that further men’s ‘rights and opportunities.’” “Put another way, the findings highlight that high modesty may protect men from perceptions of deprivation and men’s rights activism in turn,” she added.
In the second study, the researchers expanded the project to include 492 men, split almost evenly between White and Black Americans. The authors wanted to see if the connection between modesty and activism existed across different racial groups. While the men’s rights movement is often stereotyped as being exclusively White, emerging scholarship has highlighted the presence of a Black manosphere, where Black men engage in online conversations about men’s issues and articulate similar narratives of gender-based disadvantage.
The researchers also tested whether making the idea of male disadvantage highly visible would alter the results. Participants first completed the same measure of trait modesty used in the first study. Half of the men were then asked to take a minute to reflect on the ways men are disadvantaged relative to women, and write four sentences about it. The other half acted as a comparison group and wrote four sentences about their morning routines. After this writing task, all participants completed the measures of deprivation and activism.
The experimental writing task did not change the underlying personality effects. Across both White and Black participants, low modesty consistently predicted a stronger sense that men are unfairly deprived. Just as in the first study, this sense of group deprivation predicted a greater willingness to support and engage in men’s rights activism.
The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2023, which found that personal feelings of disadvantage drive hostile sexism toward women. However, the new study specifically measures how group-based deprivation predicts support for collective men’s rights activism rather than individual sexist attitudes.
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting the results. The experimental writing task in the second study did not actually increase feelings of relative deprivation compared to writing about a morning routine. This suggests the specific writing exercise might not have been strong enough to affect participants’ views, or that trait modesty exerts a stable influence regardless of the immediate situation.
Also, the researchers note that low modesty shares some overlap with narcissism. Future research is needed to untangle exactly how much of this effect is driven by low modesty alone versus related narcissistic traits, like a desire for authority or a tendency to exploit others. The study also focused exclusively on White and Black men. The authors point out that other minority groups, such as Asian American and Latino men, face unique racial and cultural pressures that could alter how modesty and feelings of deprivation interact.
Finally, the studies were conducted entirely in the United States. Cultural norms around modesty and gender vary widely across the world, meaning these patterns might look different in other countries. More research is needed to see if these psychological pathways hold true in different cultural contexts.
“Given the correlational nature of the data, we also cannot determine a causal link between personality, perceptions of relative deprivation, and men’s rights activism,” the researchers noted. “We know that these things are linked and have explanatory power, but we need to conduct a further experimental study to determine if one variable causes the other, and in which order.” For instance, they explained, “does heightened relative deprivation causally increase men’s rights activism, or does engaging in men’s rights activism/collective action color men’s perceptions of their group’s status in society.”
“We don’t want to convey that the manosphere and men’s rights activism can be explained purely by personality,” the researchers emphasized. “It’s also important to remember that personality is malleable – just because men lower in trait modesty are more likely to perceive men as deprived in society and support/engage in men’s rights activism doesn’t mean that their modesty perceptions can’t change. Cultivating higher modesty may be a key avenue for protecting men from the manosphere’s influence.”
Looking ahead, the researchers are continuing this line of inquiry, including work with the EMMELO project an EU-funded initiative examining the role of masculinity in extremist movements. “We are currently conducting research where we show that modesty and feeling deprived (individually and as a man) predict men’s support for manosphere figures in the U.S. context,” they said. “We aim to design interventions that may decrease men’s support for—and engagement in—the manosphere, which are informed by our ongoing work on the role of modesty and relative deprivation in underpinning endorsement of the manosphere.”
The study, “Low modesty and feeling deprived as a man: A psychological explanation of men’s rights activism,” was authored by Joanna Lindström and Morgana Lizzio-Wilson.
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