--- title: "Why Attack Ads Work on Men and Not on Women" date: 2026-09-08T14:30 author: Julien Reszka description: "A field experiment ran the identical campaign as a negative and a positive ad. It moved male turnout eight points. It moved nothing for women." keywords: ["government", "decision-making", "social dynamics", "stress"] canonical: https://julienreszka.com/blog/why-attack-ads-work-on-men-and-not-on-women/ --- # Why Attack Ads Work on Men and Not on Women A field experiment ran the identical campaign as a negative and a positive ad. It moved male turnout eight points. It moved nothing for women. A 2024 field experiment ran the identical mayoral campaign in two versions, one negative and one positive. The negative ad raised turnout among male voters by about eight percentage points and changed nothing measurable for women. The reverse held too: positive campaigning swung female votes toward the opponent, while negative campaigning was what moved men. Economists Vincenzo Galasso and Tommaso Nannicini were not testing a theory of stress. They just found its fingerprints in the vote count. For decades, the stress response was described as a single, universal circuit: fight or flight. In 2000, UCLA psychologist Shelley Taylor and her colleagues described a different pattern on the female side of that circuit. Under threat, women lean more toward protecting their group and drawing it closer, a pattern Taylor named tend and befriend, rather than confronting or fleeing the threat directly. The mechanism runs through a hormone already in the body. Stress raises oxytocin in everyone, and oxytocin promotes calm, affiliative behavior. Estrogen amplifies that calming effect, and androgens blunt it, so the same stress hormone pulls the average man toward confronting a threat and the average woman toward gathering people close. Evolutionary psychologists describe a matching pattern one level up, at the group instead of the individual. Mark van Vugt and colleagues ran a set of public-goods experiments and found that men contributed more to their own team specifically when that team was competing against a rival group; take the rival away, and their contributions dropped back down. Women's cooperation with their own team held steady whether or not a rival was present. Men bond over a shared fight. Women bond by default. Two distinct playbooks show up across otherwise unrelated studies: - Naming a common threat and calling people to fight it together raises male turnout, votes, and teamwork, an effect that fades once the rival is gone - Naming the team on its own, through care, protection, or community service, raises female turnout, votes, and teamwork without needing a rival at all That second pattern has been tested directly outside the lab, too. Researchers studying the gender gap in political ambition found that describing a run for office as community service made women more willing to run, while the identical wording made men less willing, closing the ambition gap between them in that one condition. There is a third option, and it does not split the room at all. A meta-analysis of fear appeal research by Kim Witte and Mike Allen found that messages pairing a real threat with a clear, doable response, what they called high threat paired with high efficacy, produced the strongest persuasive effect of any combination tested. Gender barely showed up as a factor in how people processed that combination, and the review's own advice to message writers was that they did not need to build separate versions for it. Naming a danger only pulls one lever. Naming a danger and handing people something concrete to do about it seems to pull both at once. None of this makes the split absolute. Follow-up work on tend and befriend found that both men and women report tending and befriending more often than fighting or fleeing; the sex difference is a shift in emphasis on average, not a rule for every person in every room. A room full of women can rally around a fight, and a room full of men can be moved by an appeal to protect their community. The research describes where the average lever sits, not what any one person will do. A speech built to move an entire room at once rarely needs to pick a side between fighting for one half and connecting with the other. The more reliable move is to give the room something to fear and something to do about it in the same breath. Noticing whether a speech, or an ad, is doing that, or just pulling one lever and hoping half the room does not mind, is a useful way to listen to the next one you hear. --- **Actionable insight:** If you want one message to move everyone, do not choose between a call to fight and a call to connect. Pair a real threat with something concrete people can do about it, the one combination in this research where the gender gap disappears. ## Key figure **8 pts** — The turnout increase among male voters after a negative campaign ad, in a field experiment where the identical message left female turnout unchanged *Source: Galasso, V. and Nannicini, T., Persuasion and gender: experimental evidence from two political campaigns, Public Choice, 2024* ## Myth vs reality **Myth:** A negative attack ad is a mistake because it turns off voters across the board. **Reality:** In a real mayoral race, a negative ad raised male turnout by eight percentage points and changed nothing for women, while a positive version of the same campaign swung female votes instead. *Source: Galasso, V. and Nannicini, T., Persuasion and gender: experimental evidence from two political campaigns, Public Choice, 2024* ## Products I recommend Free credits to start, pay only for what you use after. - [Generate ad copy variants](https://reloadium.com/reloadium-copywriter?ref=https%3A%2F%2Fjulienreszka.com%2Fblog%2Fwhy-attack-ads-work-on-men-and-not-on-women%2F) - [Simulate your post](https://reloadium.com/reloadium-instavibe-simulator/?ref=https%3A%2F%2Fjulienreszka.com%2Fblog%2Fwhy-attack-ads-work-on-men-and-not-on-women%2F)