I'm offended
Power, Objectification, and Recognition of Sexualized Women and Men
Ciro Civile & Sukhvinder Obhi
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
In contemporary society, sexual objectification is usually thought of as something that men do to women. However, this notion risks conflating the gender of the perpetrator with the fact that men often hold more social power than women. In the current study, we investigated whether power itself was associated with changes in processing of sexualized human targets, independent of the gender of the power holder. In Experiment 1, we primed separate groups of female participants to high-, low-, or neutral-power. We then engaged them in a recognition task involving upright or inverted sexualized images of men and women. Previous research using stimulus inversion manipulations has found that inversion of faces/bodies, but not of objects, disrupts recognition performance, suggesting a reliance on more configural processing in face/body perception compared to object perception. We found that women primed to high-power did not show an inversion effect for sexualized men but did show an inversion effect for sexualized women. In contrast, women primed to low-power showed an inversion effect for sexualized men and women. In Experiment 2, we replicated this finding and found a similar effect of power for male participants perceiving sexualized images of women. We discuss our results with reference to the literatures on objectification and the cognitive processes involved in the perception of sexualized men and women. Our study provides seminal evidence that power, rather than gender per se, may play a central role in sexual objectification.
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Mary Louise Cowan et al.
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
While much research has explored humorous exchange in relation to mate choice, recent perspectives have emphasized the importance of humor for monitoring interest within social partnerships more generally. Indeed, given that similarity is thought to be important in the maintenance of social partnerships, we may expect humor appreciation to vary according to the degree of similarity between humor producers and recipients. In the current study we report evidence for such variation that is specific to men's judgments of other men's humor. Here we manipulated voice pitch in a set of 'one-liner' jokes to create low-pitched and high-pitched versions of men and women telling jokes. A composite measure of men's own dominance was positively correlated with their preference for jokes told by other men with lowered voice pitch (a vocal cue to dominance). A follow-up study demonstrated that self-reported dominance was positively related to men's choice of low-pitch men as friends when judging humorous audio clips but not when judging neutral control audio clips, suggesting that humour may be important in mediating the effect of dominance on friendship choice. These studies indicate systematic variation in humor appreciation related to friendship choices which may function to promote cohesion within male partnerships based on status.
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Halo Effects and the Attractiveness Premium in Perceptions of Political Expertise
Carl Palmer & Rolfe Peterson
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Physical appearance, both our own and that of others, is a common influence on social interactions. In this article, we consider whether appearance also plays a role in how we come to understand politics. As a test, we use American National Election Study survey data, which includes the interviewer's subjective ratings of respondents' appearance and perceived political knowledge. We bolster the ANES results with a pair of survey experiments where subjects evaluated randomly assigned potential political discussion partners. Our results show that more attractive individuals are viewed as more knowledgeable and more persuasive, and are more likely to be sought out by others for political information. In addition, more attractive individuals (even the relatively uninformed) are more likely to report attempting to persuade others. These findings have implications for our understanding of how citizens identify political experts, the potential for the spread of misinformation, and the political judgments citizens make.
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Whites' Desire to Affiliate and Perceived Understanding in Interracial Interactions
Deborah Son Holoien
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2016, Pages 7-16
Abstract:
Four studies investigated whether the desire to affiliate with Blacks motivates Whites to perceive that they understand Blacks during discussions of racial topics. Whites' desire to affiliate predicted perceived understanding of Blacks when discussing racial topics (Study 1a), and this effect was mediated by Whites' self-image goals during the interaction (Study 3). Furthermore, Whites' desire to affiliate with Blacks created divergent perceptions of understanding when discussing racial topics (Studies 1b and 2), such that Whites felt they understood Blacks but Blacks did not feel similarly understood. Whites interacting with Black (vs. White) partners reported greater desire to affiliate during discussions about racial topics, which in turn led to greater perceived understanding of the partner (Study 4). I discuss the implications of Whites' desire to affiliate with Blacks when talking about race.
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Stefanie Simon & Laurie O'Brien
Sex Roles, September 2015, Pages 245-257
Abstract:
The goal of the present study was to examine the effect of nonprejudiced credentialing on men who are confronted for sexism. Specifically, this study explored whether providing a male perpetrator with nonsexist credentials intensifies or ameliorates the negative interpersonal outcomes that female confronters often incur. In this experimental study, 147 male undergraduate participants from a university in southern Louisiana, United States, were given false feedback on a gender IAT indicating that they held nonsexist attitudes towards women (or not) and were subsequently confronted by a female experimenter for making a sexist remark (or not). The findings revealed that men who had nonprejudiced credentials viewed a woman who confronted them as less competent and had a stronger preference to avoid her in the future as compared to men who did not have nonprejudiced credentials. Furthermore, confronting was not effective at lowering men's expressions of gender prejudice. Theoretical implications and practical implications for confronting sexism are discussed.
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Gendered Race in Mass Media: Invisibility of Asian Men and Black Women in Popular Magazines
Joanna Schug et al.
Psychology of Popular Media Culture, forthcoming
Abstract:
According to gendered race theory, racial stereotypes can contain a gendered component whereby certain racial and ethnic groups are viewed as being more prototypically masculine or feminine. A number of studies investigating gendered race stereotypes have found that Blacks in North American society are represented and conceived as prototypically masculine, while Asians are represented and conceived of as prototypically feminine. This study examined whether patterns consistent with gendered race prototypes appear in mass media depictions, specifically in popular magazines, such that Asian men and Black women are proportionally less likely than other groups to be depicted. The perceived race and gender of 8,672 individuals depicted within 5 issues each of 6 popular magazines were examined quantitatively to examine whether individuals from nonprototypical gendered race categories were less likely to be depicted. The results indicated that Asian women were more likely to be depicted than Asian men, while Black men were more likely to be depicted than Black women, relative to Whites. These results suggest that, consistent with theories of gendered race and intersectional invisibility, individuals deemed less prototypical of their race and gender categories are rendered invisible in societal representations.
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Steven Roberts & Susan Gelman
Child Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
Categorizations of multiracial individuals provide insight into the development of racial concepts. Children's (4-13 years) and adults', both White (Study 1) and Black (Study 2; N = 387), categorizations of multiracial individuals were examined. White children (unlike Black children) more often categorized multiracial individuals as Black than as White in the absence of parentage information. White and Black adults (unlike children) more often categorized multiracial individuals as Black than as White, even when knowing the individuals' parentage. Children's rates of in-group contact predicted their categorizations. These data suggest that a tendency to categorize multiracial individuals as Black relative to White emerges early in development and results from perceptual biases in White children but ideological motives in White and Black adults.
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Colin Holbrook, Daniel Fessler & Carlos David Navarrete
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
We hypothesize that, paralleling the evolution of human hierarchies from social structures based on dominance to those based on prestige, adaptations for representing status are derived from those for representing relative fighting capacity. Because both violence and status are important adaptive challenges, the mind contains the ancestral representational system as well as the derived system. When the two representational tasks conflict, owing to the exigent nature of potential violence, the former should take precedence over the latter. Indeed, separate literatures indicate that, despite the fact that threatening traits are generally deleterious to prestige, both threatening individuals and high-status individuals are conceptually represented as physically large. We investigated the interplay between size-based representations of threat versus prestige by examining racial danger stereotypes. In three studies, we demonstrate that (a) judgments of status only positively correlate with envisioned body size for members of groups stereotyped as safe, (b) group-based inferences of interpersonal threat are mediated by representations of physical size, (c) controlling for perceived threatening aggressiveness reduces or reverses non-positive correlations between status and size, and (d) individuating information about relative threat or status attenuates the influence of group danger stereotypes. These results support our proposal that ancestral threat-representation mechanisms and derived mechanisms for representing social rank coexist - and sometimes compete - in the mind.
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Fear and Implicit Racism: Whites' Support for Voter ID laws
Antoine Banks & Heather Hicks
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Oftentimes, Whites are unaware that they may have slighted Blacks. Although researchers have spent a considerable amount of attention disentangling this form of implicit (unconscious) racial bias from explicit (conscious) racial bias, we are less clear about the conditions that cause implicit racism to matter in American politics. In this article, we offer a theory of how fear and Whites' unconscious racial bias are tightly linked in memory, and triggering this emotion can make these implicit attitudes more salient in public opinion. To test our theory, we focus on Whites' opinions toward voter ID laws. Our expectation is that inducing fear should cause implicit racism to play an important role in Whites' evaluation of the policy. Using an adult national experiment over two waves, we induced several emotions to elicit fear, anger, or relaxation. The findings show that the fear condition causes Whites high in implicit racism to be more supportive of voter ID laws than similar individuals in the anger and control conditions. On the other hand, fear does not cause Whites high in explicit racism to be more supportive of voter ID laws.
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Cutting Gordian Knots: Reducing Prejudice Through Attachment Security
Muniba Saleem et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
The positive role of secure attachment in reducing intergroup biases has been suggested in prior studies. We extend this work by testing the effects of secure attachment primes on negative emotions and aggressive behaviors toward outgroup members across four experiments. Results from Studies 1A and 1B reveal that secure attachment prime, relative to neutral, can reduce negative outgroup emotions. In addition, Studies 1B and 3 results rule out positive mood increase as an alternative explanation for the observed effects. Results from Studies 2 and 3 reveal that secure attachment primes can reduce aggressive behavior toward an outgroup member. The effect of secure attachment primes on outgroup harm was found to be fully mediated by negative emotions in Studies 2 and 3. An interaction between secure attachment primes and ingroup identification in Study 2 indicated that the positive effects of secure attachment in reducing outgroup harm may be especially beneficial for highly identified ingroup members.
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Priming Race: Does the Mind Inhibit Categorization by Race at Encoding or Recall?
David Pietraszewski
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research shows that racial categorization can be reduced by contexts in which race does not predict how people interact and get along - a manipulation with little to no effect on sex and age. This suggests that our minds attend to race as an implicit cue to how people are likely to get along. However, the underlying mechanism of how these contexts reduce race is not yet known. Is race not encoded? Or, is race encoded, but then inhibited? The present study arbitrates between these possibilities. Results demonstrate that the reduction in racial categorization is happening at recall. Participants are still encoding targets' race, but this information is locked away or inhibited. This clarifies how the mind switches away from previously relevant, but now irrelevant, social cues: it does not immediately abandon them, rather, it encodes them but inhibits their use.
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Real or Artificial? Intergroup Biases in Mind Perception in a Cross-Cultural Perspective
Eva Krumhuber et al.
PLoS ONE, September 2015
Abstract:
Recent research suggests that attributions of aliveness and mental capacities to faces are influenced by social group membership. In this article, we investigated group related biases in mind perception in participants from a Western and Eastern culture, employing faces of varying ethnic groups. In Experiment 1, Caucasian faces that ranged on a continuum from real to artificial were evaluated by participants in the UK (in-group) and in India (out-group) on animacy, abilities to plan and to feel pain, and having a mind. Human features were found to be assigned to a greater extent to faces when these belonged to in-group members, whereas out-group faces had to appear more realistic in order to be perceived as human. When participants in India evaluated South Asian (in-group) and Caucasian (out-group) faces in Experiment 2, the results closely mirrored those of the first experiment. For both studies, ratings of out-group faces were significantly predicted by participants' levels of ethnocultural empathy. The findings highlight the role of intergroup processes (i.e., in-group favoritism, out-group dehumanization) in the perception of human and mental qualities and point to ethnocultural empathy as an important factor in responses to out-groups.
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Stereotype Threat Impairs Older Adult Driving
Ann Lambert et al.
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Stereotypes can harm human performance, especially when activated in individuals with diminished working memory capacity (WMC). Performance implications for the stereotype of poor driving in older adults were investigated. Using a sample of older adults, WMC (the ability to maintain task goals and ignore distractions) and driving performance [brake reaction time (RT), following distance, and crashes] were assessed, the latter using a high-fidelity simulator. Elderly participants under stereotype threat with reduced WMC exhibited slower brake RTs and longer following distances compared with a control condition that was not threatened. This driving profile was characteristic of cognitive distraction. Stereotype threat has clear consequences for human performance in a common real-world task - driving - that is critical to public safety. Furthermore, these findings suggest caution in how the media and public policy communicate information about older adult driving.
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Growing Fixed With Age: Lay Theories of Malleability Are Target Age-Specific
Rebecca Neel & Bethany Lassetter
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Beliefs about whether people can change ("lay theories" of malleability) are known to have wide-ranging effects on social motivation, cognition, and judgment. Yet rather than holding an overarching belief that people can or cannot change, perceivers may hold independent beliefs about whether different people are malleable - that is, lay theories may be target-specific. Seven studies demonstrate that lay theories are target-specific with respect to age: Perceivers hold distinct, uncorrelated lay theories of people at different ages, and younger targets are considered to be more malleable than older targets. Both forms of target-specificity are consequential, as target age-specific lay theories predict policy support for learning-based senior services and the rehabilitation of old and young drug users. The implications of target age-specific lay theories for a number of psychological processes, the social psychology of aging, and theoretical frameworks of malleability beliefs are discussed.
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Cute Little Things: The Objectification of Prepubescent Girls
Elise Holland & Nick Haslam
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
In two studies, we examined the impact of sexualization of prepubescent girls on college students' perceptions of girls' mental capacity and moral standing. Previous research has shown that women depicted in sexualized and other body-focused ways are perceived as lacking mental capacities and moral standing; these perceptions reduce concern about them when they are victimized. However, no other research to date has examined whether the same effects hold for young girls. Study 1 demonstrated that college students attributed lower mental capacity and lower moral status to girls dressed in revealing attire in the same way, and to the same degree, as they viewed sexually mature women. In Study 2, we replicated this finding and found that objectifying perceptions are associated with less sympathetic responses to girls in a bullying scenario. Participants showed less care that sexually objectified girls had been harmed, less favorable attitudes towards helping them, and a greater belief that the girls were responsible for being victimized. Taken together, these findings suggest that the potentially damaging manifestations and consequences of objectification are manifest before girls reach womanhood. We suggest recommendations for reducing the sexualization of young girls.
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Essentialism and Racial Bias Jointly Contribute to the Categorization of Multiracial Individuals
Arnold Ho, Steven Roberts & Susan Gelman
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Categorizations of multiracial individuals provide insight into the psychological mechanisms driving social stratification, but few studies have explored the interplay of cognitive and motivational underpinnings of these categorizations. In the present study, we integrated research on racial essentialism (i.e., the belief that race demarcates unobservable and immutable properties) and negativity bias (i.e., the tendency to weigh negative entities more heavily than positive entities) to explain why people might exhibit biases in the categorization of multiracial individuals. As theorized, racial essentialism, both dispositional (Study 1) and experimentally induced (Study 2), led to the categorization of Black-White multiracial individuals as Black, but only among individuals evaluating Black people more negatively than White people. These findings demonstrate how fundamental cognitive and motivational biases interact to influence the categorization of multiracial individuals.
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The flip side of the other-race coin: They all look different to me
Sarah Laurence, Xiaomei Zhou & Catherine Mondloch
British Journal of Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Poorer recognition of other-race faces than own-races faces has been attributed to a problem of discrimination (i.e., telling faces apart). The conclusion that 'they all look the same to me' is based on studies measuring the perception/memory of highly controlled stimuli, typically involving only one or two images of each identity. We hypothesized that such studies underestimate the challenge involved in recognizing other-race faces because in the real world, an individual's appearance varies in a number of ways (e.g., lighting, expression, hairstyle), reducing the utility of relying on pictorial cues to identity. In two experiments, Caucasian and East Asian participants completed a perceptual sorting task in which they were asked to sort 40 photographs of two unfamiliar identities into piles such that each pile contained all photographs of a single identity. Participants perceived more identities when sorting other-race faces than own-race faces, both when sorting celebrity (Experiment 1) and non-celebrity (Experiment 2) faces, suggesting that in the real world, 'they all look different to me'. We discuss these results in the light of models in which each identity is represented as a region in a multidimensional face space; we argue that this region is smaller for other-race than own-race faces.
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Taylor Kohut, Jodie Baer & Brendan Watts
Journal of Sex Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
According to radical feminist theory, pornography serves to further the subordination of women by training its users, males and females alike, to view women as little more than sex objects over whom men should have complete control. Composite variables from the General Social Survey were used to test the hypothesis that pornography users would hold attitudes that were more supportive of gender nonegalitarianism than nonusers of pornography. Results did not support hypotheses derived from radical feminist theory. Pornography users held more egalitarian attitudes - toward women in positions of power, toward women working outside the home, and toward abortion - than nonusers of pornography. Further, pornography users and pornography nonusers did not differ significantly in their attitudes toward the traditional family and in their self-identification as feminist. The results of this study suggest that pornography use may not be associated with gender nonegalitarian attitudes in a manner that is consistent with radical feminist theory.