Beyond Prejudice as Simple Antipathy: Hostile and Benevolent Sexism Across Cultures

The authors argue that complementary hostile and benevolent componen:s of sexism exist ac ro.ss cultures. Male dominance creates hostile sexism (HS). but men's dependence on women fosters benevolent sexism (BS)-subjectively positive attitudes that put women on a pedestal but reinforce their subordination. Research with 15,000 men and women in 19 nations showed that (a) HS and BS are coherenl constructs th at correlate positively across nations, but (b) HS predicts the ascription of negative and BS the ascription of positive traits to women, (c) relative to men, women are more likely to reject HS than BS. especially when overall levels of sexism in a culture are high, and (d) national averages on BS and HS predict gender inequal ity across nations. These results challenge prevailing notions of prejudice as an antipathy in that BS (an affectionate, patronizing ideology) reflects inequality and is a cross-culturally pervasive complement to HS

Me, us or them: who is more conformist? Perception of conformity and political orientation

Research has shown that people perceive others as more vulnerable thanthemselves to media communication, and their political out-group as more vulnerable thantheir political in-group. In the present study, the authors predicted that the same two biaseswould appear with respect to another kind of influence—conformity—but that participants’judgments would display a different pattern according to their political orientations. Rightwingand left-wing university students were asked to evaluate conformity and to estimatehow conformist they, their political in-group, their political out-group, and other groups are.As hypothesized, right-wingers expressed more ambivalence toward conformity and viewedit less negatively than did left-wingers. Political orientation had no impact on the discrepancybetween self and others, but it did moderate the in-group–out-group discrepancy

Thinking, arguing, and counter-arguing: the effects of issue relevance and minority influence on the choice of argumentation strategies

The relationship between argumentation and reasoning has received much attention in educational psychology, as argumentation is considered the tool that supports any cognitive activity. Nevertheless, being confronted with conflicting points of view does not guarantee a cognitive progress, since different argumentation strategies can reflect more or less accurate cognitive elaboration. In that, we make a parallel between argumentation and hypothesis testing tasks, where confirmatory biases, anchoring effects, etc., are examples of a general focussing effect (i.e., a tendency to consider only the elements already present in one\u2019s cognitive field and to ignore any divergent information), while falsification of alternatives witnesses a decentering tendency that ensures the use/acquisition of more advanced cognitive skills. We propose that the same focussing and decentering tendencies can be retrieved also in the field of argumentation. In fact, when arguing about an issue, speakers can hold their position either a) enforcing some statements they already agree with, or b) trying to confute alternative standpoints. Developing this parallel, we also predict that socio-cognitive conditions that are proved to foster decentering in hypothesis testing, will favour the appearance of counter-arguing strategies. In particular, we hypothesize that high personal relevance, and confrontation with a minority source of influence, should enhance the use of counter-arguments, whereas low relevance of the issue, and exposure to majority influence, should favour the enforcement of already shared arguments. In a 2 (relevance: high vs. low) x 2 (source of influence: majority vs. minority) experimental design, 114 university students were asked to develop three arguments in order to express their point of view about the introduction of a final comprehensive exam, choosing between confirmatory and disconfirmatory arguments. Results confirm the predicted source*relevance interaction. Implication for the design of argumentation activities in education will be discussed