Hey girl. You've probably seen those Ryan Gosling memes floating around the interwebs--you know, the ones where he says all the things girls like to hear. Well, these scientists set out to see if memes can garner more than just a laugh, and investigated whether they could actually change people's views on important subjects. To do so, they showed groups of men and women a variety of Ryan Gosling feminist memes, and then tested whether the memes had any effect on the participants' feminist beliefs. Surprisingly, although the men didn't rate themselves any more feminist after seeing the memes, they did display "significantly higher endorsement of subtypes of feminism (radical and social)." The results were presented at the 2014 Canadian Psychological Association annual conference (abstract below). We assume these scientists are already hard at work on their follow-up study focused on how magnets work.
The Effect of Ryan Gosling Feminist ...
