Men Who Sleep Less Are Seen As More Masculine: A Stereotype With Potentially Damaging Consequences

By Emily Reynolds There are some curious cultural ideas around sleep, namely that there’s something virtuous or impressive about not getting very much of it. “Burnout” is often shorthand for success: if you’re successful it follows that you’re also pretty busy, in which case you’re less likely to get enough sleep. Margaret Thatcher famously boasted that she only needed to sleep four hours a night, as has Donald Trump — though whether that bolsters or damages the prestige associated with sleepless nights probably depends on your politics. There may also be links between sleep and perceptions of masculinity, a new paper in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research suggests. In a number of studies, Nathan B. Warren and Troy H. Campbell from the University of Oregon found that not only do we associate sleep deprivation with masculinity, but that men who sleep less actually experience more favourable social judgements than their better-rested counterparts. In the first study, 144 participants were asked to imagine a man shopping for a bed; when approached by a salesperson, the man is asked how much he sleeps. Participants were randomly assigned to two conditions: in one, the man answers that he sleeps a lot, while in the other he states that he sleeps very little. After hearing the man’s answer, participants rated how masculine they felt he was — and when participants heard that he had lots of sleep, masculinity ratings were signi...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Gender Sleep and dreaming Source Type: blogs