Social Consensus Feedback as a Strategy to Overcome Spontaneous Gender Stereotypes

Abstract

Across two experiments the present research examined the use of social consensus feedback as a strategy for overcoming spontaneous gender stereotyping when certain social role nouns and professional terms are read. Participants were presented with word pairs comprising a role noun (e.g., surgeon) and a kinship term (e.g., mother) and asked to decide whether both terms could refer to the same person. In the absence of training, participants responded more slowly and less accurately to stereotype incongruent pairings (e.g., surgeon/mother) than stereotype congruent pairings (e.g., surgeon/father). When participants were provided with (fictitious) social consensus feedback, constructed to suggest that past participants did not succumb to stereotypes, performance to incongruent pairings improved significantly (Experiment 1). The mechanism(s) through which the social feedback operated were then investigated (Experiment 2), with results suggesting that success was due to social compliance processes. Implications of findings for the field of discourse processing are discussed.

Funding

This research was supported by funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 237907.

Notes

¹ Although this difference in bias ratings was not ideal, it was deemed more pertinent to choose the most strongly biased role nouns for each sex than to choose role nouns with matching degrees of typicality (as evidence of overcoming stereotyping to the strongest exemplars should logically extend to role nouns with a weaker bias rating).

² We use the term critical to refer to stereotype biased and neutrally rated items and word pairs that include such an item.

³ However, despite the fact that accuracy to male, definitionally mismatching word pairs was found to be relatively low in previous experiments by these authors (likely because of the generic interpretation of certain male-specific terms, e.g., host, landlord), feedback continued to strongly suggest that such terms should be interpreted according to their definitional gender (i.e., as male-specific). For instance, if a mismatch pairing such as host/mother was judged as acceptable, feedback stated that only 0 to 2% of people agreed with this response.

⁴ No reliable main effects or interactions with this variable were found and so it is not considered further. Indeed, gender differences in performance were not anticipated in this study based on previous findings of Oakhill et al. (2005).

⁵ A one-tailed t-test was used for this comparison (because it was anticipated that performance on the incongruent pairings would improve after the social feedback training), whereas all remaining differences were examined using two-tailed tests. This procedure was also followed for the RT data.

⁶ However, findings from another study from our lab (Finnegan et al., 2014) suggest that practice effects are also likely to have contributed to this decrease in RTs, i.e., participants in a control condition who did not receive feedback after responding in Block 2 of the same judgment task were still found to naturally increase their speed of responding as the experiment progressed.

⁷ A short pilot study was conducted to assess the credibility of the chosen feedback range. Eight students (all female) were administered just one block of judgment trials (used in Experiment 1), with feedback provided after each response. The newly constructed feedback centered on 50% for stereotype-incongruent pairings, ranging from 35% to 65% for both yes and no responses. On completion of the block of trials, participants were asked a number of questions about their experience of the task. Most importantly, on a scale of 1 (believable) to 5 (unbelievable), it was found that participants judged the RSCF to be “quite believable” (M = 2, SD = 1.07), and all participants reported feeling influenced by the feedback they received. Satisfied with these findings on the plausibility of the feedback provided, Experiment 2 was subsequently conducted using the same parameters. Note that the behavioral data from the pilot study was not analyzed because we were simply interested in ascertaining whether participants found the fictitious feedback to be believable or not.