# The implicit association between masculinity and criminal organizations

## TL;DR

The paper explores how criminal organizations are implicitly associated with masculinity, which influences people's attitudes toward them.

## Contribution

It introduces the use of implicit association tests to examine how masculinity is linked to criminal organizations.

## Key findings

- Individuals implicitly associate criminal organizations with masculinity.
- Stronger implicit associations increase the positive attitudes of those endorsing masculine honor ideologies toward criminal organizations.

## Abstract

Criminal groups, such as Italian criminal organizations, exert governance over communities. According to Intra-Cultural Appropriation Theory (ICAT), these groups can gain a degree of legitimacy by strategically appropriating masculinity values. Specifically, by portraying themselves as embodying masculinity, criminal organizations are evaluated more positively by individuals who endorse masculine honor ideologies. An untested assumption of this process is that individuals ascribe masculine qualities to criminal groups. In two studies (Ntot = 310), we employed the Single Category Implicit Association Test to investigate whether individuals implicitly associated the categories of ‘male’ (Study 1) and ‘masculinity’ (Study 2) with criminal organizations as opposed to the state. Additionally, in Study 2, we tested whether this implicit association moderated the relationship between individuals’ endorsement of masculine honor ideology and their attitudes toward criminal organizations. The findings supported the hypothesis that individuals implicitly attributed masculinity-related concepts to criminal organizations. Study 2 further showed that the positive link between endorsement of masculine honor ideology and legitimizing attitudes towards criminal organizations was stronger when individuals also held a stronger implicit association between masculinity and criminal organizations.