Power and the confrontation of sexism: the impact of measured and manipulated power on confronting behavior

ABSTRACT

The confrontation of prejudicial acts and comments promotes multiple benefits, most notably the prevention of future prejudicial remarks and the reduction of stereotype use. Research, however, consistently shows low rates of confronting prejudice, particularly regarding sexism. Here, we examine whether personal sense of power, known to increase action and activate the behavioral approach system, increases the likelihood of confronting a sexist remark. In Study 1, we demonstrate that for both women and men, self-reported power is associated with a higher frequency of confronting sexism. In Study 2, we manipulate women’s sense of power (i.e., high power, low power, or control) and subsequently present an opportunity to confront a sexist remark. Results show that women primed to feel powerful were more likely to confront the sexist remark and expressed greater disagreement with the comment, compared to women primed to feel powerless. Implications for the confronting literature and behavior are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexism
• confronting prejudice
• power

Acknowledgments

Nicholas Alt acknowledges support from the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship (32 CFR 168a).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2022.2122767.

Data availability statement

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

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/tuknq.

Notes

1. No significant order effects across the seven different order combinations emerged, ps >.284.

2. Participants also responded to a battery of questionnaires including a gender group identity scale, The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (Glick & Fiske, 1996), The Modern and Old-Fashioned Sexism Scales (Swim et al., 1995), the Frequency of Confronting scale, the Chronic Perception of Sexism Scale, and Perceived Costs and Benefits of Confronting (Good et al., 2012). While not central to our hypotheses, we included these questionnaires as potential moderators of our effects. Of these measures, the only significant interaction to emerge was with the benevolent sexist attitude sub-scales of Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, which is described in the Online Supplemental Material.

3. This amounted to 19 out of 176 responses for the confront coding and 16 responses for the disagreement coding.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicholas P. Alt

Nicholas P. Alt is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Occidental College. His research examines the visual perception of groups of people and the mitigation of bias via confronting behaviors.

Jenniffer Wong Chavez

Jenniffer Wong Chavez is a Ph.D. student at the University of Kansas. Her current research interests include prejudice reduction, social perception and anti-immigrant attitudes.

Cheryl L. Dickter

Cheryl L. Dickter - is a Professor in the Psychological Sciences Department at William & Mary. Her research examines how people perceive individuals of different social groups as well as the factors involved in the confrontation of prejudice.

Margaret J. Shih

Margaret J. Shih is the Neil Jacoby Chair Professor of Management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Her research focuses on social identity, implicit bias and addressing social inequity in organizations.