Based on data for = 2,756 children (1,410 girls; = 8.10 years) from 16 data sets spanning five nations, this study investigated relations between national gender disparities and children's beliefs about gender and academic subjects. One national-level gender disparity involved inequalities in socioeconomic standing favoring adult males over females (U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
January 2023
Research suggests that exposure to social networking sites portraying a thin and often sexualized beauty ideal reduces young women's body satisfaction, while exposure to body-positive content improves it. However, it is unclear whether sexualization could impair the beneficial effects of body-positivity messages. Young Italian women were exposed to one of three experimental conditions showing sexualized beauty ideals, sexualized body positivity, or non-sexualized body positivity that appeared either on Instagram (Study 1, = 356) or TikTok (Study 2, = 316).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe goal of the present study was to investigate the causal direction of influence between the ingroup as a whole and the self or another ingroup member considering a key feature of groups, i.e., their perceived meaningfulness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFActa Psychol (Amst)
March 2019
Men outscore women in mental rotation. Among the possible explanations for this result are gender stereotypes. Research has shown that instructions confirming or disconfirming the gender stereotype that men are more talented than women may affect performance in some spatial tasks, such as mental rotation, but research so far has shown inconsistent or null results.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWomen's representation in social media is becoming increasingly sexualized, even when they are victims of sexual harassment (SH). In the present research, we adopted a bystander approach to investigate the role of victims' sexualization on bystanders' reactions to an episode of SH. In Study 1, female participants read a fictitious newspaper article that described a workplace SH episode: According to condition, the article included a picture of the victim who was wearing either sexualized or nonsexualized clothing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough previous research has demonstrated that objectification impairs female cognitive performance, no research to date has investigated the mechanisms underlying such decrement. Therefore, we tested the role of flow experience as one mechanism leading to performance decrement under sexual objectification. Gaze gender was manipulated by having male versus female experimenters take body pictures of female participants (N = 107) who then performed a Sustained Attention to Response Task.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA commonly held stereotype is that women are poor drivers. This stereotype is recognized and endorsed by women and girls very early on, long before taking their driving licence, nevertheless they are less involved in accidents and drive safer and less fast than men. In line with the stereotype threat theory, the present study tests the hypothesis that making the driving stereotype salient will lead women to underperform in a driving simulation task.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial identification denotes individuals' psychological bond with their ingroup. It is an indispensable construct in research on intragroup and intergroup dynamics. Today's understanding of social identification is firmly grounded in self-stereotyping principles (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough stereotype awareness is a prerequisite for stereotype threat effects (Steele & Aronson, 1995), research showed girls' deficit under stereotype threat before the emergence of math-gender stereotype awareness, and in the absence of stereotype endorsement. In a study including 240 six-year-old children, this paradox was addressed by testing whether automatic associations trigger stereotype threat in young girls. Whereas no indicators were found that children endorsed the math-gender stereotype, girls, but not boys, showed automatic associations consistent with the stereotype.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSelf-stereotyping is a process by which people belonging to a stigmatized social group tend to describe themselves more with stereotypical traits as compared with traits irrelevant to the ingroup stereotype. The present work analyzes why especially members of low-status groups are more inclined to self-stereotype compared to members of high-status groups. We tested the hypothesis that belonging to a low-, rather than a high-status group, makes low-status members feel more threatened and motivates them to protect their self-perception by increasing their similarity with the ingroup.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious research on stereotype threat in children suggests that making gender identity salient disrupts girls' math performance at as early as 5 to 7 years of age. The present study (n = 124) tested the hypothesis that parents' endorsement of gender stereotypes about math moderates girls' susceptibility to stereotype threat. Results confirmed that stereotype threat impaired girls' performance on math tasks among students from kindergarten through 2nd grade.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe present work looks at the self-stereotyping process and reveals its underlying cognitive structure. When this process occurs, it is necessarily the result of an overlap between the representation of the ingroup and that of the self. Two studies measured this overlap and showed that it was higher on stereotype-relevant than on stereotype-irrelevant traits, it involved both positive and negative stereotypical traits, and it implied a deduction-to-the-self process of ingroup stereotypical dimensions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSix studies (N = 491) investigated the inductive potential of nouns versus adjectives in person perception. In the first 5 studies, targets were either described by an adjective (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study investigated the role of negative thinking as a potential mediator of performance deficits under stereotype threat. After being assigned to a stereotype-threat or a no-threat condition, 60 female participants were asked to complete a difficult math task. Using the thought-listing technique, women under stereotype threat reported a higher number of negative thoughts specifically related to the test and to mathematics compared with women in the no-threat condition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study was conducted to test whether group identification (importance of the group to the individual) covaried with individual-group similarity on problem behavior; and whether group identification moderated peer group influence on the individual's development of delinquent behavior across a 1-year period. The level of reciprocated nominations within the individual's self-nominated group was controlled for in all analyses. Participants were 190 sixth and seventh graders (during the first year of the study) from the north of Italy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Pers Soc Psychol
November 2003
Two laboratory experiments investigated the hypothesis that threat to male identity would increase the likelihood of gender harassment. In both experiments, using the computer harassment paradigm, male university students (N=80 in Experiment 1, N=90 in Experiment 2) were exposed to different types of identity threat (legitimacy threat and threat to group value in Experiment 1 and distinctiveness threat and prototypicality threat in Experiment 2) or to no threat and were then given the opportunity to send pornographic material to a virtual female interaction partner. Results show that (a) participants harassed the female interaction partner more when they were exposed to a legitimacy, distinctiveness, or prototypicality threat than to no threat; (b) this was mainly true for highly identified males; and (c) harassment enhanced postexperimental gender identification.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF