When sexism is not a problem: The role of perceived intelligence in willingness to interact with someone who is sexist

ABSTRACT

Two studies examined factors that would influence people’s preferences for interaction with a perpetrator of sexism. In Study 1 (n = 348), participants preferred to interact (being friends or developing a relationship) with an intelligent person regardless of whether or not that person was sexist. Study 2 (n = 614) replicated this finding and confirmed that where a perpetrator had a high level of intelligence, people were more willing to interact with them, regardless of the perpetrator’s sex and the perceived commission or non-commission of sexist behavior. Moreover, Study 2 provides evidence that participants’ hostile sexism beliefs are a significant covariate of a willingness to interact with unintelligent women. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the understanding of person perception.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexism
• intelligence
• halo effect
• person perception

Disclosure statement

The author declares no potential conflict of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or preparation of this research and publication of this article and confirms that this manuscript adheres to the APA ethical guidelines and the author’s national ethics guidelines.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/4x6c8/.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/4x6c8/.

Notes

1. Even though sexism is widespread both toward women and men, in everyday perception sexism is mainly perceived as a negative and neglectful attitude of men toward women (and not vice versa) (Swim & Campbell, 2003). That is why in Study 1, a male character was used as the perpetrator.

2. Russian social network (an equivalent of Facebook). Vkontakte has an average daily audience of more than 80 million visitors, while more than 460 million users are registered (51% are women, and the most represented user age group is 18 to 34).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academic Fund Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2018-2019 [18-01-0081]; Russian Academic Excellence Project “5-100”.

Notes on contributors

Elena Agadullina

Elena Agadullina is an Associate Professor in Social Psychology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. Her research is focused on social perception and lay theories.