Reducing Automatic Stereotype Activation: Mechanisms and Moderators of Situational Attribution Training

Individuals tend to underestimate situational causes and overly rely on trait causes in explaining negative behaviors of outgroup members, a tendency named the ultimate attribution error (Pettigrew, 1979). This attributional pattern is directly related to stereotyping, because attributing negative behaviors to internal, stable causes tends to perpetuate negative stereotypes of outgroup members. Recent research on implicit bias reduction revealed that circumventing individuals’ tendency to engage in the ultimate attribution error led to reduced stereotyping. More specifically, training White participants to consider situational factors in determining Blacks’ negative stereotypic behaviors led to decreased automatic stereotype activation. This technique was named Situational Attribution Training (Stewart, Latu, Kawakami, & Myers, 2010). In the current studies, I investigated the mechanisms and moderators of Situational Attribution Training. In Study 1, I investigated the effect of training on spontaneous situational inferences. Findings revealed that training did not increase spontaneous situational inferences: both training and control participants showed evidence of spontaneous situational inferences. In Study 2, I investigated whether correcting trait inferences by taking into account situational factors has become automatic after training. In addition, explicit prejudice, motivations to control prejudice, and cognitive complexity variables (need for cognition, personal need for structure) were investigated as moderators of training success. These findings revealed that Situational Attribution Training works best for individuals high in need for cognition, under conditions of no cognitive load, but not high cognitive load. Training increased implicit bias for individuals high in modern racism, regardless of their cognitive load. Possible explanations of these findings were discussed, including methodological limitations and theoretical implications

Gender Biases in (Inter) Action: The Role of Interviewers’ and Applicants’ Implicit and Explicit Stereotypes in Predicting Women’s Job Interview Outcomes

Although explicit stereotypes of women in the workplace have become increasingly positive, negative stereotypes persist at an implicit level, with women being more likely associated with incompetent-and men with competent-managerial traits. Drawing upon work on self-fulfilling prophecies and interracial interactions, we investigated whether and how implicit and explicit gender stereotypes held by both male interviewers and female applicants predicted women's interview outcomes. Thirty male interviewers conducted mock job interviews with 30 female applicants. Before the interview, we measured interviewers' and applicants' implicit and explicit gender stereotypes. The interviewers' and applicants' implicit stereotypes independently predicted external evaluations of the performance of female applicants. Whereas female applicants' higher implicit stereotypes directly predicted lower performance, male interviewers' implicit stereotypes indirectly impaired female applicants' performance through lower evaluations by the interviewer and lower self-evaluations by the applicant. Moreover, having an interviewer who was at the same time high in implicit and low in explicit stereotypes predicted the lowest performance of female applicants. Our findings highlight the importance of taking into account both implicit and explicit gender stereotypes in mixed-gender interactions and point to ways to reduce the negative effects of gender stereotypes in job interviews. Additional online materials for this article are available to PWQ subscribers on PWQ's website at http://pwq.sagepub.com/supplemental

An Evidence-Based Approach to Covid-19 Pandemic Effects on Academics

We discuss our evidence-based approach to understanding and addressing the gendered impact of the pandemic on academics at Queen’s University Belfast, a research-intensive Russell Group UK University. The study was a collaboration between the University-wide Queen’s Gender Initiative, researchers, and Human Resources. A staff survey ran from 23 September until 30 October 2020, assessing academic productivity and personal factors including caring responsibilities, wellbeing, and time spent working. Data from 537 academics showed that multiple challenges were experienced with most of the day spent on work and caregiving tasks. The majority of worktime comprised teaching, at a cost to research productivity and personal wellbeing. These patterns were accentuated for female academics. From this holistic approach to understanding academics’ challenges, recommendations were presented to the University’s Executive Board and other high-level institutional committees. An Action Plan of sustainable solutions designed to mitigate the pandemic effect focused on promotion, research, workload support, and wellbeing. Furthermore, the findings directly informed policies to enhance working life, particularly in new models of flexible working. In summary, we report methodology to integrate research and centralized efforts to address the pandemic’s impact on academics, using a gender lens and incorporating complementarity of work, home-life and wellbeing

Power poses – where do we stand?

<p>Dynamic results for Scenario 2.</p

Psychometric Properties and Correlates of Precarious Manhood Beliefs in 62 Nations

Precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action. Here, we present cross-cultural data on a brief measure of precarious manhood beliefs (the Precarious Manhood Beliefs scale [PMB]) that covaries meaningfully with other cross-culturally validated gender ideologies and with country-level indices of gender equality and human development. Using data from university samples in 62 countries across 13 world regions (N = 33,417), we demonstrate: (1) the psychometric isomorphism of the PMB (i.e., its comparability in meaning and statistical properties across the individual and country levels); (2) the PMB’s distinctness from, and associations with, ambivalent sexism and ambivalence toward men; and (3) associations of the PMB with nation-level gender equality and human development. Findings are discussed in terms of their statistical and theoretical implications for understanding widely-held beliefs about the precariousness of the male gender role

Navigating the leaky pipeline: Do stereotypes about parents predict career outcomes in academia?

The motherhood penalty seemingly reflects a preference to hire female professionals who are not parents compared to mothers, however, little is known about whether this effect is attributable to parent stereotypes per se. Study 1 assessed the content of the parent-academia stereotypes of 180 individuals working in Education and revealed stronger stereotypical associations of fathers with academia than mothers. Study 2 investigated what parent-academia stereotypes predict in terms of endorsements for hiring men versus women in a mock hiring task set in an academic context. Academics (N = 112) evaluated mock job candidates for an Assistant Professor post while the gender, parental status and leave status of the candidates were manipulated. The findings showed that parents were significantly less likely to be endorsed to be hired than non-parents, regardless of gender. Parent-academia stereotypes led to biased hiring recommendations, such that a greater endorsement of parent-academia stereotypes predicted a reduced likelihood to endorse hiring parents compared to non-parents. Implications for reducing parent stereotypes in academic contexts are discussed