The Influence of Males and Females on the Psychophysical Judgments of Females

Summary

A transfer paradigm was employed to test the hypothesis that females influenced by males on one task would show more carryover of the influence effect to other tasks than would females influenced by other females. Thirty female college students made judgments on three cross-modal matching tasks. Experimental subjects gave their judgments on one task along with two male or two female confederates, who appeared to give discrepant judgments. They then made another series of private judgments on the other two tasks. Comparison to a control group and to an original series of private judgments revealed a significant direct influence effect, but minimal transfer to the other two tasks. There was a nonsignificant tendency for the subjects to be more directly influenced by other females than by males, but this influence by the other females was accompanied by a decline in task confidence. Influence by males on females did not result in lowered confidence. This finding may be restricted to quantitative tasks and to American college students.