The social performance of gender roles: men report lower support for women’s empowerment when in front of their peers

Beliefs about gender roles are widely understood to be acquired via social learning. However, accounts of gender socialization remain disconnected from a growing literature on evolved social learning strategies. We implemented a novel field experiment to elucidate how social information on gender is produced and transmitted among young men in an urbanizing Tanzanian community. Men interviewed in front of their peers reported lower support for women's empowerment compared to men interviewed privately. We interpret this finding as indicative of men modifying or strategically misrepresenting beliefs to match an assumed lack of support for women's empowerment among their peers. We also found that men interviewed in front of community elders, assumed to hold relatively patriarchal beliefs, reported relatively low support for women's empowerment. However, contrary to our expectations, men interviewed in the presence of highly educated urban men, assumed to be more supportive of women's empowerment, also reported lower support than when interviewed privately. Supporting qualitative data suggests that our assumptions about our comparison groups may be somewhat naive, with participants emphasizing similarity rather than differences between themselves and those from the city. We discuss the implications of our results for our understanding of gender socialization from a cultural evolution perspective. This article is part of the theme issue 'Transforming cultural evolution research and its application to global futures'.