I think this argument could be correct, but the article relies too heavily on taking polling results at face value.
For example, this poll includes a prominent warning that social desirability bias may have influenced results. The finding "Male Trump voters prioritize family but don't think others do the same" was deduced from the questions: "If you had to choose, which is more important to you personally? And which do you think is more important to the majority of American men?" The response split requires more scrutiny, imo.
If you agree that there's social pressure to say you prioritize family (across the political spectrum, for different reasons), I think you have to consider that some unknowable share of respondents used the second question as a safety valve, as an opportunity to hedge their first answer or express a view they weren't comfortable stating directly.
There are other problems, too: the questions are underspecified and people lie to themselves. As I read the article, "Breaking Bad" kept invading my thoughts, Bryan Cranston snarling "I'm doing this for my family" to justify acts of mayhem, or more pointedly, his absence from his family.
Polling is valuable, but rarely tells a simple story.
> If you agree that there's social pressure to say you prioritize family (across the political spectrum, for different reasons)
I don't know that I would. Cultural pressures are wide-ranging and regularly contradictory. Archetypes of what a person "should" be often portray excellence in multiple fields without accounting for whether or not it's possible to achieve that in the time a person has available. Men and women often feel like they're supposed to have good careers and be involved parents and probably volunteer at church too for good measure. Though it is true that one could interpret "prioritize family" as "work overtime to build my kids' college fund".
I also don't think social desirability bias should be expected to heavily sway anonymous poll responses. If you suppose it does, it becomes easy to dismiss any data that contradicts your expectations as irrelevant in the face of your own ideas on what most people believe. At that point, you may as well abandon systematic surveys entirely in favor of armchair speculation.
I agree with your first paragraph, but I don't think it contradicts my assertion that there's social pressure to say you prioritize family. The fact that those pressures are contradictory and/or impossible are part of what makes it difficult to interpret polling results. Also, as you observe (and I tried to get across with the Breaking Bad example), questions are usually underspecified relative to the arguments people want to make with them.
Regarding your second point, it's surprising and weird that social desirability bias sways anonymous poll responses, but we know it's true from countless studies of voting, charitable giving, and other behaviors. The degree of influence varies: for ordinary political questions, the effect is usually only a few percentage points. But studies appear to show that 5-15 point gaps are common in polls that touch on sensitive subjects, and highly stigmatized behaviors show even larger gaps.
I don't want to be drawn into overclaiming anything myself, so I'll try to stick to what I consider my main point: we cannot take cross-sectional opinion polling to be a transparent expression of preferences, even though that means we have less evidence than we'd like.
Sure, I've linked a couple of examples below. To be clear, researchers don't claim to have direct access to people's true beliefs. They claim to see discrepancies:
1) Between what people report and what verifiable records show
This is the clearest evidence that social desirability influences anonymous surveys. Voting is the classic example: people consistently report voting at higher rates than validated voting records indicate. "Validating Self-Reported Turnout by Linking Public Opinion Surveys with Administrative Records" is a careful treatment of this (https://imai.fas.harvard.edu/research/files/turnout.pdf).
2) Between responses given under different polling conditions
Studies comparing survey methods consistently find differences, and the differences run in the direction you'd expect. Some methods work by making it impossible for researchers to recover any individual's answer. Others work the opposite way: the "pipeline" approach tells respondents up front that their turnout can be checked against official records. Both push reported turnout down. One study found the pipeline wording cut self-reported turnout by 5.7 points in the 2020 ANES, which is most of the estimated overreporting bias (https://academic.oup.com/poq/article/88/2/268/7649338).
The fact that both kinds of manipulation move answers in the same direction is hard to explain if ordinary anonymous surveys were already getting honest answers.
Finally, some nuance: the size of these effects varies by topic. Turnout is the best-documented case. When researchers ran the same techniques looking for hidden Trump support in 2016, they mostly found nothing. But I also want to reiterate that this is only one of many difficulties here. Social desirability bias, self-deception, and ambiguous wording all depress the evidentiary value of polls. By default, we should treat results as weak evidence: directionally interesting leads, not findings.
I recently had several weeks on disability leave from work after major surgery. I didn't worry for a second about missing anything important at work. I agonized constantly that I wasn't able to be a good father because I couldn't pick up my daughter due to lifting restrictions. It was very clarifying in demonstrating to myself what I valued.
A lot of the discourse about this on the male side is IMO just a big Unintentional Confession about not being in the market for affluent/educated women partners. Virtually no one able to access the situation is like “man, all this additive material well-being sucks, actually.”
Exactly! Internet social conservatives talk as if women's jobs pay Monopoly money rather than real money that the entire household can spend. Or say inane degrowther stuff about how you shouldn't "need" the extra money. Whereas most normal people like money.
Most importantly Nobody can have it all, time is finite. Tradeoffs must be made.
That being said, I think what most people want is the ability to get buy on one earner especially when the kids are young. they don't want to be forced into a two earner household
I'm one of the lucky ones that kind of sort of gets buy one one income. But 40 years ago the position I have in the company vs the cost of living would make this super easy.
Do we sometimes think about my wife (with an MBA) going back to work. Sure, it would nice not to have all the financial responsibility. But it's also nice not to spend all our evenings and weekends doing chores. Or to have someone that can get the kids to activities. And of course we are home schooling right now because the local schools suck, and the kids are on phones are youtube all day at school.
Again, there are tradeoffs for everything.
Final thought, women on average are very unwilling to marry down. My now wife flat out told me if I wasn't going to college and trying to make something of myself she wouldn't have married me.
men in general are just much more likely to be willing to date and marry the cute waitress then a woman is likely to marry the bussboy
Men being the breadwinner seems like it is more driven by the preferences of women, rather than men.
Women tend to value their partners wages, while men tend to be much less picky in this regard. I think the percentage of women who want a husband who earns more money is much higher than the percentage of men who want a wife who earns less money than them.
It makes sense that people would want a partner who earns more than them, it is nice to have more money! But most men would feel weird about prioritizing finding a partner who outearns them, while that is relatively normal for women. So a disproportinate amount of hetero couples still have the man being the breadwinner.
Also, don't just look at what people say but how they act. Look at what happens to family stability when the husband is without a job for a prolonged period of time vs the wife.
I'm glad Maibritt Henkel's article takes up the issue of work-life balance for men, and men's desires generally. But I don't fully buy it. A better survey question than asking people how strongly they agreed with the statement "most men should be breadwinners" might be "On a Scale of 1 to 10 how strongly would you prefer to be the primary breadwinner in your family, or at least make an equal amount of money as your spouse?" A better question than asking about the degree to which "men want more than career success" (of course we do) would be "how important is having a career than offers high money or status to you?"
I'll also note that as a spouse of a fairly senior health care practitioner I earn a lot less money than my wife. We have done well in our long marriage, but our income and status disparity is not a neutral, non-painful issue. It's a hard issue, especially for me. This is true even though I find my work as teacher very meaningful, as you can see in my posts here on Substack.
I'll repeat my suggestion that the design of the survey questions led to the particular result.
I think this argument could be correct, but the article relies too heavily on taking polling results at face value.
For example, this poll includes a prominent warning that social desirability bias may have influenced results. The finding "Male Trump voters prioritize family but don't think others do the same" was deduced from the questions: "If you had to choose, which is more important to you personally? And which do you think is more important to the majority of American men?" The response split requires more scrutiny, imo.
If you agree that there's social pressure to say you prioritize family (across the political spectrum, for different reasons), I think you have to consider that some unknowable share of respondents used the second question as a safety valve, as an opportunity to hedge their first answer or express a view they weren't comfortable stating directly.
There are other problems, too: the questions are underspecified and people lie to themselves. As I read the article, "Breaking Bad" kept invading my thoughts, Bryan Cranston snarling "I'm doing this for my family" to justify acts of mayhem, or more pointedly, his absence from his family.
Polling is valuable, but rarely tells a simple story.
Been rewatching Breaking Bad lately, great show
“Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they’re growing.” (J.B. Priestly)
> If you agree that there's social pressure to say you prioritize family (across the political spectrum, for different reasons)
I don't know that I would. Cultural pressures are wide-ranging and regularly contradictory. Archetypes of what a person "should" be often portray excellence in multiple fields without accounting for whether or not it's possible to achieve that in the time a person has available. Men and women often feel like they're supposed to have good careers and be involved parents and probably volunteer at church too for good measure. Though it is true that one could interpret "prioritize family" as "work overtime to build my kids' college fund".
I also don't think social desirability bias should be expected to heavily sway anonymous poll responses. If you suppose it does, it becomes easy to dismiss any data that contradicts your expectations as irrelevant in the face of your own ideas on what most people believe. At that point, you may as well abandon systematic surveys entirely in favor of armchair speculation.
Taking your points separately:
I agree with your first paragraph, but I don't think it contradicts my assertion that there's social pressure to say you prioritize family. The fact that those pressures are contradictory and/or impossible are part of what makes it difficult to interpret polling results. Also, as you observe (and I tried to get across with the Breaking Bad example), questions are usually underspecified relative to the arguments people want to make with them.
Regarding your second point, it's surprising and weird that social desirability bias sways anonymous poll responses, but we know it's true from countless studies of voting, charitable giving, and other behaviors. The degree of influence varies: for ordinary political questions, the effect is usually only a few percentage points. But studies appear to show that 5-15 point gaps are common in polls that touch on sensitive subjects, and highly stigmatized behaviors show even larger gaps.
I don't want to be drawn into overclaiming anything myself, so I'll try to stick to what I consider my main point: we cannot take cross-sectional opinion polling to be a transparent expression of preferences, even though that means we have less evidence than we'd like.
Can you still find those studies? I would be interested to see how they tried to find the participants' true beliefs without using a poll.
Sure, I've linked a couple of examples below. To be clear, researchers don't claim to have direct access to people's true beliefs. They claim to see discrepancies:
1) Between what people report and what verifiable records show
This is the clearest evidence that social desirability influences anonymous surveys. Voting is the classic example: people consistently report voting at higher rates than validated voting records indicate. "Validating Self-Reported Turnout by Linking Public Opinion Surveys with Administrative Records" is a careful treatment of this (https://imai.fas.harvard.edu/research/files/turnout.pdf).
2) Between responses given under different polling conditions
Studies comparing survey methods consistently find differences, and the differences run in the direction you'd expect. Some methods work by making it impossible for researchers to recover any individual's answer. Others work the opposite way: the "pipeline" approach tells respondents up front that their turnout can be checked against official records. Both push reported turnout down. One study found the pipeline wording cut self-reported turnout by 5.7 points in the 2020 ANES, which is most of the estimated overreporting bias (https://academic.oup.com/poq/article/88/2/268/7649338).
The fact that both kinds of manipulation move answers in the same direction is hard to explain if ordinary anonymous surveys were already getting honest answers.
Finally, some nuance: the size of these effects varies by topic. Turnout is the best-documented case. When researchers ran the same techniques looking for hidden Trump support in 2016, they mostly found nothing. But I also want to reiterate that this is only one of many difficulties here. Social desirability bias, self-deception, and ambiguous wording all depress the evidentiary value of polls. By default, we should treat results as weak evidence: directionally interesting leads, not findings.
I recently had several weeks on disability leave from work after major surgery. I didn't worry for a second about missing anything important at work. I agonized constantly that I wasn't able to be a good father because I couldn't pick up my daughter due to lifting restrictions. It was very clarifying in demonstrating to myself what I valued.
A lot of the discourse about this on the male side is IMO just a big Unintentional Confession about not being in the market for affluent/educated women partners. Virtually no one able to access the situation is like “man, all this additive material well-being sucks, actually.”
Exactly! Internet social conservatives talk as if women's jobs pay Monopoly money rather than real money that the entire household can spend. Or say inane degrowther stuff about how you shouldn't "need" the extra money. Whereas most normal people like money.
Yes, lolol. “Oh no! Another 50 grand! <slaps giant stack of hunneds like invasive species encroaching upon the threshold>”
there are tradeoffs to that extra income. Especially so when kids are young
Sure, and the whole thing about tradeoffs is that they net out distinctly for each case, and different people evaluate them differently.
Exactly.And family should be free to decide what works best for them
Most importantly Nobody can have it all, time is finite. Tradeoffs must be made.
That being said, I think what most people want is the ability to get buy on one earner especially when the kids are young. they don't want to be forced into a two earner household
I'm one of the lucky ones that kind of sort of gets buy one one income. But 40 years ago the position I have in the company vs the cost of living would make this super easy.
Do we sometimes think about my wife (with an MBA) going back to work. Sure, it would nice not to have all the financial responsibility. But it's also nice not to spend all our evenings and weekends doing chores. Or to have someone that can get the kids to activities. And of course we are home schooling right now because the local schools suck, and the kids are on phones are youtube all day at school.
Again, there are tradeoffs for everything.
Final thought, women on average are very unwilling to marry down. My now wife flat out told me if I wasn't going to college and trying to make something of myself she wouldn't have married me.
men in general are just much more likely to be willing to date and marry the cute waitress then a woman is likely to marry the bussboy
Men being the breadwinner seems like it is more driven by the preferences of women, rather than men.
Women tend to value their partners wages, while men tend to be much less picky in this regard. I think the percentage of women who want a husband who earns more money is much higher than the percentage of men who want a wife who earns less money than them.
It makes sense that people would want a partner who earns more than them, it is nice to have more money! But most men would feel weird about prioritizing finding a partner who outearns them, while that is relatively normal for women. So a disproportinate amount of hetero couples still have the man being the breadwinner.
What do the “men should be the breadwinner” responses look like when you break it down by income/education?
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/lX1XF/1/
Interesting! some class gradient but not as much as I would have thought.
and age! The generational divide is probably very strong on this one
Also, don't just look at what people say but how they act. Look at what happens to family stability when the husband is without a job for a prolonged period of time vs the wife.
I'm glad Maibritt Henkel's article takes up the issue of work-life balance for men, and men's desires generally. But I don't fully buy it. A better survey question than asking people how strongly they agreed with the statement "most men should be breadwinners" might be "On a Scale of 1 to 10 how strongly would you prefer to be the primary breadwinner in your family, or at least make an equal amount of money as your spouse?" A better question than asking about the degree to which "men want more than career success" (of course we do) would be "how important is having a career than offers high money or status to you?"
I'll also note that as a spouse of a fairly senior health care practitioner I earn a lot less money than my wife. We have done well in our long marriage, but our income and status disparity is not a neutral, non-painful issue. It's a hard issue, especially for me. This is true even though I find my work as teacher very meaningful, as you can see in my posts here on Substack.
I'll repeat my suggestion that the design of the survey questions led to the particular result.
Interesting findings, thanks for the write-up! :)
Yes--and a great piece of analysis.
Asking "should people do X" or polling whether people say they want X is not the same as answering the question "does X make people happy?"
Especially true when X is counter cultural coded or involves front loaded costs.