Abstract
This paper explores how the use of gender ratios to inform stimulus selection affects the activation of gendered social information. It investigates if stimuli selected this way can activate gender stereotype knowledge and/or conceptual gender knowledge. This was tested through attribute naming (Study 1) and rating (Study 2) tasks, with component and regression analysis allowing for examination of the nature of gender ratios at both attribute and component levels. The results provide rich information about the nature of gender ratio information as a means of stimulus selection, and in doing so support both conceptualisations as long as researchers acknowledge their overlap. The results also indicate that these roles elicited both positive/prescriptive (i.e., the role is appropriate for a given gender) and negative/proscriptive beliefs (i.e., the role is not appropriate for a given gender). These findings hold important implications for future research using gender ratios.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Psychological Reports |
| Early online date | 14 May 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 14 May 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright © The Author(s) 2024. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the Sage and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).Data Access Statement
Due to the terms outlined by the Human Ethics Committee, data from Study 1 (attribute naming task) cannot be made available due to the potential identifiability of participants. Data from Study 2 that has been appropriately anonymized, along with analytical scripts, is available from NTNU Open Data (https://dataverse.no/dataverse/ntnu).Funding
This research was partially funded by the Norwegian Research Council, with funding awarded to three of the authors (JDK, UG, PG). The grant number for this research is FRIPRO 240881. The Norwegian Research Council website is https://www.forskningsradet.no/. The Norwegian Research Council had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. There was no additional external funding received for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Keywords
- gender ratios
- gender stereotypes
- conceptual gender
- psycholinguistics