Toxic Masculinity Test: See Which Masculine Norms You Hold Most Rigidly
People search for a toxic masculinity test; what this page measures is how rigidly you hold seven masculine norms, from emotional control to winning and self-reliance. You see your full profile, your two strongest norms, and what the research says about each.
Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW 
Toxic Masculinity Test: Masculine Norms Self-Check is a free, confidential 28-question self-assessment, original items informed by the masculine norms literature, not the CMNI. It takes about 6 minutes, runs entirely in your browser, and gives you a plain-language profile of your strongest style plus an optional in-depth report. It is an educational screening, not a diagnosis.
Rigid norms, not toxic men
Toxic masculinity is the phrase people search for, so it is in the title. It is not what this page thinks of men, and it is not what the research measures. What researchers measure is conformity to masculine norms: how strongly a person holds rules like never show weakness, handle it alone, always win, and never back down. Those norms are learned, they vary enormously between men, and some of them carry real costs while others do not. This self-check scores seven of them so you can see your own pattern. It also tells you which norms the research links to worse mental health and relationships, and which are neutral or useful in moderation.
Seven norms, scored separately
Emotional control, self-reliance, winning and dominance, risk-taking, power over others, disdain for commitment, and primacy of work. These are drawn from the conformity to masculine norms literature that James Mahalik and colleagues established with the Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory. Most quizzes on this topic produce one shaming score; this one shows seven bars so you can see where you are rigid and where you are not.
Your two strongest norms, read together
The leading norm gets a full reading, and the page asks you to read your second bar with it, because the combination is what shapes behavior. High emotional control with high self-reliance looks very different in a crisis from high emotional control with high winning, and the readings say so.
Which norms cost you and which do not
A 2017 meta-analysis of 78 samples found that self-reliance, the playboy norm and power over women were the norms most consistently linked to worse mental health, while primacy of work was not linked to any outcome and risk-taking cut both ways. The readings separate norms that can help in moderation from those tied to loneliness, avoided help, and strained relationships.
| Feature | Typical free quiz | Psychology.com |
|---|---|---|
| What it measures | Whether you are a toxic man | How rigidly you hold seven specific norms, each scored separately |
| Grounded in the masculine norms research | Rarely | Informed by the CMNI literature (Mahalik and colleagues); named, not reproduced |
| Separates harmful from neutral norms | Treats all as toxic | Yes, following the 2017 meta-analysis by norm |
| Tone of the result | Often a label or a joke | A reading of costs and benefits that ends with what to do next, never a verdict |
| Sexual content | Common | None; the commitment norm is handled as attitudes to attachment and dependence |
| Clinician-reviewed interpretation | Rarely | Yes, interpretation reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW |
| Answers stay on your device | Often collected | Scored in your browser; only summary scores if you request a PDF or report |
The 7 patterns this test measures
- Emotional control: Keeping feelings hidden; never showing hurt, fear or need.
- Self-reliance: Handling everything alone; asking for help feels like failure.
- Winning and dominance: Needing to win and to be in charge; losing feels unbearable.
- Risk-taking: Seeking danger and thrill; caution feels like weakness.
- Power over others: Expecting to be in charge at home and in relationships; the final say is yours.
- Disdain for commitment: Avoiding being tied to one person; dependence feels like a trap.
- Primacy of work: Work comes first; worth is measured in output and earning.
If nothing is endorsed, every pattern scores the same, or the leading patterns tie, the result says so instead of naming a single pattern.
What the evidence says about rigid norms and men's mental health
The research on masculine norms does not say that masculinity is harmful. It says that holding certain norms rigidly carries measurable costs. Y. Joel Wong and colleagues pooled 78 studies with more than 19,000 participants in 2017 and found that higher conformity to masculine norms was associated, overall, with worse mental health and with less willingness to seek psychological help. When they looked norm by norm, three stood out as consistently linked to poorer outcomes: self-reliance, the playboy norm, and power over women. Primacy of work was not significantly related to any mental health outcome, and risk-taking was linked to both positive and negative outcomes depending on the measure.
Help-seeking is where the costs show most clearly. Seidler and colleagues' 2016 systematic review found that men who hold traditional norms more strongly are less likely to recognize depression in themselves, less likely to seek help for it, and more likely to drop out of treatment once started. The hardest evidence concerns suicide: Coleman, Feigelman and Rosen's 2020 analysis of the Add Health cohort found that men who scored high on traditional masculinity, a cluster that includes emotional restriction, competitiveness and aggression, were about 2.4 times as likely to die by suicide as other men, even though they were less likely to report suicidal thoughts. Men in the United States die by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women. Loneliness follows the same logic: a man who must not need anyone and must not show weakness has few places to take trouble when it comes.
What healthy masculinity looks like
Healthy masculinity is not the absence of the norms above. Self-reliance in moderation is competence; a drive to win is ambition; the capacity to stay calm under pressure is a gift to everyone around you. The difference is flexibility. A man who can handle most things alone and also knows when to ask is well served by self-reliance; a man who cannot ask at all is trapped by it. A man who stays steady in a crisis and can later say what it cost him has emotional control; a man who has not told anyone how he feels in a decade has emotional isolation. The American Psychological Association's 2018 guidelines for practice with boys and men make the same point: the goal is not to strip men of strength, drive or stoicism but to loosen the rules enough that those traits serve the man rather than cage him.
In practice that looks like a few concrete things: having at least one person you would call at two in the morning; being able to name three feelings besides angry and fine; losing at something without it ruining the day; taking a day off sick without guilt; and treating a partner's wish to decide things together as normal rather than as a challenge. If some of those are hard, the norms readings below will tell you which rule is in the way. The Gender Role Test looks at the wider picture of masculine and feminine traits as you hold them, and the Emotional Intelligence Test at the skills that flexibility depends on.
A note for partners, family and friends
If you are reading this because of a man in your life, a few things are worth knowing. First, nobody can take this test for someone else; a profile built from your view of him describes your experience, which matters, but it is not his result and this page cannot diagnose him. Second, rigid norms are rules a man learned, often from a father or a peer group that punished any deviation, and they are usually experienced from the inside as duty rather than as choice. Shaming them tends to tighten them. Third, the norm that most often shapes how a man responds to your concern is self-reliance: he may hear an invitation to talk as a verdict that he is failing to cope.
What helps, according to the help-seeking research, is framing support as strength and strategy rather than as weakness, making specific and low-pressure offers rather than open questions, and modeling the behavior yourself. If he is withdrawing, drinking more, angrier than usual, or talking about being a burden, those can be how depression looks in men who hold these norms, and the Depression Test and Anger Issues Test on this site are written for him to take himself. If you are ever worried about his safety, in the US you can call or text 988 and speak to someone yourself about how to raise it.
Methodology & sources
This profile is informed by the conformity to masculine norms literature, in particular the Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory (CMNI) developed by James Mahalik and colleagues in 2003 and the shortened CMNI-46 validated by Parent and Moradi in 2009. The CMNI measures eleven norms, including winning, emotional control, risk-taking, violence, power over women, dominance, playboy, self-reliance, primacy of work, disdain for homosexuality and pursuit of status. This page does not reproduce any CMNI item. We wrote 28 original statements, four for each of seven norms of our own grouping: emotional control, self-reliance, winning and dominance (combining two CMNI norms), risk-taking, power over others (informed by the CMNI power over women and dominance norms, worded about relationships and households generally), disdain for commitment (informed by the playboy norm but written entirely about attachment and dependence, with no sexual content), and primacy of work. We left out the violence and heterosexual self-presentation norms. Each statement is rated on a five-point agreement scale scored 0 to 4; there are no reversed items. The engine sums each norm and shows seven bars, with the highest as your leading norm.
This is an educational self-assessment for reflection, not the CMNI and not a clinical or predictive instrument. The seven-norm structure is our own and has not been validated; findings for the CMNI do not establish the accuracy of this version, and we have no norms, reliability data, or cutoffs. A high bar means you agreed more strongly with those statements than with the others, not that you rank high among men or that you are toxic. The readings draw on the 2017 meta-analysis by Wong and colleagues, which found that self-reliance, the playboy norm and power over women were the norms most consistently associated with poorer mental health and lower help-seeking, that primacy of work was not associated with any outcome, and that risk-taking was associated with both positive and negative outcomes. Those are average associations across samples, not predictions about any one man. The page is written for adults of any gender who want to examine the norms they hold; it is not a test of whether someone is a man.
Our commitment grouping concerns attachment and dependence rather than reproducing the CMNI playboy norm. Associations reported for that published norm cannot be transferred to these replacement items. Endorsement here is also not a validated measure of rigidity or of the harms associated with any particular norm.
References
- Mahalik JR, Locke BD, Ludlow LH, Diemer MA, Scott RPJ, Gottfried M, Freitas G. Development of the Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory. Psychology of Men & Masculinity. 2003;4(1):3–25. doi.org/10.1037/1524-9220.4.1.3
- Wong YJ, Ho MR, Wang SY, Miller ISK. Meta-analyses of the relationship between conformity to masculine norms and mental health-related outcomes. Journal of Counseling Psychology. 2017;64(1):80–93. doi.org/10.1037/cou0000176
- Seidler ZE, Dawes AJ, Rice SM, Oliffe JL, Dhillon HM. The role of masculinity in men's help-seeking for depression: A systematic review. Clinical Psychology Review. 2016;49:106–118. doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2016.09.002
- Coleman D, Feigelman W, Rosen Z. Association of high traditional masculinity and risk of suicide death: Secondary analysis of the Add Health study. JAMA Psychiatry. 2020;77(4):435–437. doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.4702
- American Psychological Association. APA Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men. 2018. apa.org/about/policy/boys-men-practice-guidelines.pdf
Cite this source
Psychology.com. (2026, October 5). Toxic Masculinity Test: Masculine Norms Self-Check. Psychology.com. https://psychology.com/tests/masculine-norms
Toxic Masculinity Test: Masculine Norms Self-Check FAQ
Is this test saying masculinity is toxic?
No. The phrase is in the title because it is what people search for. The page measures how rigidly you hold seven masculine norms, and the research it draws on finds that some of those norms, held rigidly, are linked to worse mental health and relationships, while others are neutral or useful in moderation. Strength, drive, steadiness and competence are not the problem; the inability to set them down when they are not serving you is.
What is the Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory?
The CMNI is a validated questionnaire developed by James Mahalik and colleagues in 2003 that measures how strongly a person conforms to eleven masculine norms, including winning, emotional control, risk-taking, self-reliance, primacy of work and power over women. A 46-item short form followed in 2009. It is used in research on men's health and help-seeking. This page is informed by that literature but uses its own 28 original items and its own seven-norm grouping; it is not the CMNI.
Which norms are actually harmful?
Wong and colleagues' 2017 meta-analysis of 78 samples found that self-reliance, the playboy norm and power over women were most consistently linked to poorer mental health and lower help-seeking. Primacy of work was not linked to any outcome, and risk-taking was linked to both good and bad outcomes. Emotional control and winning sat in between. Those are averages across studies; the readings for each norm explain what the pattern tends to look like in one life.
I am not a man. Can I take this?
Yes. Masculine norms are rules anyone can learn and hold, and plenty of women and non-binary people recognize self-reliance or emotional control in themselves. The research was mostly done with men, so the findings about health and help-seeking apply most directly to them, but the self-check itself is about the norms, not about being a man. Our Gender Role Test looks at masculine and feminine traits together.
My score is high on several norms. What now?
Start with the two highest and read them together; the combination is what shapes behavior. Then pick the single rule that costs you most, which for many men is self-reliance, and loosen it in one concrete way: tell one person one true thing about how you are doing. If low mood, anger or isolation are part of the picture, the Depression Test, Anger Issues Test and Loneliness Test are written to be taken by you, and a therapist who works with men can help without asking you to become someone else.
Is the test really confidential?
Yes. It runs entirely in your browser. Your individual answers are scored in your browser and are never sent to us or linked to you. They stay in this tab so you can return to your result, and closing or clearing the tab clears them. If you ask us to email the PDF, we receive your summary scores with your email address, never your individual answers. No account is needed.
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