Satisfaction tracked with getting the facts wrong
A 2018 survey of nearly 900 American men found that the more inaccurate a circumcised man's beliefs about circumcision and the foreskin, the more satisfied he tended to be with being circumcised — and the pattern ran in reverse for intact men.
Ask circumcised men whether they're satisfied and most say yes. That finding gets repeated a lot, usually as if it settles something. A 2018 study asked a more interesting question: satisfied based on what?
Bioethicist Brian D. Earp and colleagues Lynn Sardi and William Jellison surveyed 899 American men, circumcised and intact, and gave them ten true-or-false statements about circumcision and penile anatomy — things like whether the procedure reduces UTI risk, whether the foreskin has any specialized nerve tissue, and what major medical bodies actually say about it.[1] They then compared each man's accuracy score against how satisfied he reported being with his own circumcision status.
The result: among circumcised men, holding more false beliefs predicted greater satisfaction with being circumcised. Among intact men, the same false beliefs predicted the opposite — less satisfaction with being intact. Whichever way a man's body already was, believing the myths that favored the other option correlated with liking his own situation less.
What this doesn't mean
It doesn't mean facts caused the satisfaction, or the reverse. The design is correlational — a single survey at one point in time — so it can't distinguish "false beliefs make men more content" from "being content makes men more receptive to comforting beliefs," and the authors don't claim otherwise. Critics have also pushed back on some of the specific true/false items as ambiguous or oddly weighted, which is a fair challenge to sit with rather than wave away. Treat this as one data point about a pattern, not a mechanism proven.
What makes the pattern worth flagging isn't the specific numbers. It's the shape. Earp's team frames it as consistent with something already documented in a separate, older body of research: women in communities where female genital cutting is practiced also commonly report satisfaction and no lasting harm, and researchers studying that population have offered a similar explanation — people generally don't have a lived comparison point for the body they weren't allowed to keep, and cultural belief fills the gap left by that missing comparison.[2]
That's worth being precise about, because it's easy to overstate: this study didn't survey circumcised women, and it isn't presenting new data showing men and women behaving identically. It's one all-male survey, discussed alongside an existing, separate literature on FGC-affected women, because the authors think the same psychological explanation plausibly applies to both. That's a reasonable hypothesis about a shared mechanism — not a single study proving it in both groups at once.
Bottom line
Self-reported satisfaction is real and shouldn't be dismissed as false consciousness. But it isn't the same measurement as "no harm occurred," because almost nobody circumcised as an infant has an adult body to compare it against, and the beliefs that fill that gap are shaped by the culture a person grew up in — not by an examination of the alternative they never got to have.
Sources cited in this article
- Earp BD, Sardi LM, Jellison WA. "False beliefs predict increased circumcision satisfaction in a sample of US American men." Culture, Health & Sexuality, 2018;20(8):945–959. DOI 10.1080/13691058.2017.1400104. PMID 29210334.
- The comparison to self-reported outcomes among women affected by female genital cutting is the authors' own framing, drawing on a separate body of literature on that population rather than new data collected in this study.
Related: the limits of self-reported outcomes are discussed further on the Trauma page, which cites other work by the same lead author.