Because it would be unethical to try to deliberately provoke children into aggressive behaviour, the boys were then asked to complete a commonly used cognitive task to measure how aggressive they felt in response to the feedback. This involved completing a series of words. For example, the letters “gu_” could become either “gun” (aggressive) or “gut” (not aggressive).
What the fuck is this drivel?
This 'study' doesn't study aggression at all. It studies how different people perform in a game of mad libs and then calls some of that aggression.
I'm sure there is a way to measure toxic masculinity. But I grew up in the video game era when people thought playing Mortal Kombat would turn you into the fucking Columbine shooters. It's all bullshit fake pseudo-psychology.
Be very wary of this fake science. There are good researchers out there but this methodology described here is some of the worst shit I've seen for proxy aggression ever.