April H. Bailey

Preferences for moral vs. immoral traits in others are conditional

Significance It is commonly argued that humans have a dominant preference for morality traits vs. immorality traits in others—that is, irrespective of the surrounding context, morality fosters liking, and immorality fosters disliking. The results of four experiments oppose this view by showing that situational goals can eliminate and even reverse the preference for morality vs. immorality in others. These findings suggest that our preference for morality vs. immorality is conditional on the demands of our current goals and cannot be attributed solely to innate, “hardwired” links or personal learning experiences. They also suggest that immoral people sometimes win public adoration, and the power that comes with it, not in spite of but precisely because of their immorality. The preference for morality in others is regarded as a dominant factor in person perception. Moral traits are thought to foster liking, and immoral traits are thought to foster disliking, irrespective of the context in which they are embedded. We report the results of four studies that oppose this view. Using both explicit and implicit measures, we found that the preference for morality vs. immorality in others is conditional on the evaluator’s current goals. Specifically, when immorality was conducive to participants’ current goals, the preference for moral vs. immoral traits in others was eliminated or reversed. The preferences for mercifulness vs. mercilessness (experiment 1), honesty vs. dishonesty (experiment 2), sexual fidelity vs. infidelity (experiment 3), and altruism vs. selfishness (experiment 4) were all found to be conditional. These findings oppose the consensus view that people have a dominant preference for moral vs. immoral traits in others. Our findings also speak to nativist and empiricist theories of social preferences and the stability of the “social contract” underlying productive human societies.

Power poses : where do we stand?

As editors, reviewers, and authors, we are very pleased with the output of this Special Issue. We received a robust number of interesting and diverse submissions, and we were very lucky to convince...

Increasing the perceived malleability of gender bias using a modified Video Intervention for Diversity in STEM (VIDS)

Scholars are increasingly responding to calls for interventions to address persistent gender disparities in the sciences. Yet, interventions that emphasize the pervasiveness of bias may inadvertently damage efficacy to confront sexism by creating the perception that bias is immutable. We examined this possibility in the context of a successful bias literacy program, Video Interventions for Diversity in STEM (VIDS; Moss-Racusin et al., in press). In two studies with working adults from the general public (N = 343) and science faculty (N = 149), we modified VIDS by developing a module (UNITE) that offers tools for addressing bias and promotes the mindset that bias is malleable. VIDS alone was sufficient to increase awareness of bias, reduce sexism, and improve bias identification. However, UNITE buffered against perceptions that bias is immutable and restored self-efficacy to address bias. We conclude that interventions must aim not only to increase bias literacy but also offer concrete tools and avoid implying that these problems are insurmountable.

Is Man the Measure of All Things? A Social Cognitive Account of Androcentrism:

Androcentrism refers to the propensity to center society around men and men’s needs, priorities, and values and to relegate women to the periphery. Androcentrism also positions men as the gender-neutral standard while marking women as gender-specific. Examples of androcentrism include the use of male terms (e.g., he), images, and research participants to represent everyone. Androcentrism has been shown to have serious consequences. For example, women’s health has been adversely affected by over-generalized medical research based solely on male participants. Nonetheless, relatively little is known about androcentrism’s proximate psychological causes. In the present review, we propose a social cognitive perspective arguing that both social power and categorization processes are integral to understanding androcentrism. We present and evaluate three possible pathways to androcentrism deriving from (a) men being more frequently instantiated than women, (b) masculinity being more “ideal” than femininity, and/or (c) masculinity being more common than femininity.

Could a woman be superman? Gender and the embodiment of power postures

Physical postures can instill a sense of power in the self as well as communicate power to others. Recent work indicates that a target’s gender interferes with the rapid identification of power pos...

Reply to Landy et al.: Terms and conditions may apply

Landy, Piazza, and Goodwin (LP&G) have codeveloped a seminal and indispensable new model of person perception (1, 2). While endorsing LP&G’s model, we recently challenged one of its auxiliary hypotheses: the morality dominance hypothesis (MDH) (3). LP&G critiqued our studies, arguing that they merely qualify the MDH (4). We concur that the MDH must be qualified (or rejected) but hold that LP&G’s critiques are insubstantial and that their proposed qualification is inaccurate. LPG we measured implicit liking, which is … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: david.melnikoff{at}yale.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Sexism, rape myths and feminist identification explain gender differences in attitudes toward the #metoo social media campaign in two countries

ABSTRACT On October 15, 2017, actress Alyssa Milano popularized the #metoo campaign, which sought to expose the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in public domains by encouraging victims to share their experiences on social media using the hashtag metoo. The online campaign rapidly grew to a global phenomenon, which was generally well supported. However, some criticized the campaign online as a battle of the sexes, which pits men against women. Our cross-cultural research investigated whether gender differences in attitudes and feelings toward #metoo are due to underlying differences in ideologies and experiences that only partly overlap with gender. We surveyed respondents in the United States, where the campaign began, and in Norway, a highly gender-egalitarian country. In both countries, men expressed less positivity toward #metoo than women and perceived it as substantially more harmful and less beneficial. These gender differences were largely accounted for by men being higher than women in hostile sexism, higher in rape myth acceptance, and lower in feminist identification. The results, hence, suggest that gender differences in attitudes to social media campaigns such as #metoo might be best characterized as dimensional ideological differences rather than fundamental group differences.

Body posture and gender impact neural processing of power-related words

ABSTRACT Judging others’ power facilitates successful social interaction. Both gender and body posture have been shown to influence judgments of another’s power. However, little is known about how these two cues interact when they conflict or how they influence early processing. The present study investigated this question during very early processing of power-related words using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants viewed images of women and men in dominant and submissive postures that were quickly followed by dominant or submissive words. Gender and posture both modulated neural responses in the N2 latency range to dominant words, but for submissive words they had little impact. Thus, in the context of dual-processing theories of person perception, information extracted from both behavior (i.e., posture) and from category membership (i.e., gender) are recruited side-by-side to impact word processing.

Anonymously male: Social media avatar icons are implicitly male and resistant to change

When asked to pick a typical human, people are more likely to pick a man than a woman, a phenomenon reflecting androcentrism. Social media websites provide a relevant context in which to study androcentrism since many websites aim to provide users with an ostensibly gender-neutral icon if users do not upload one of their own images. In our first study, 50 male and female online participants (M age = 35.70) rated whether actual avatar icons from highly trafficked social media websites are perceived as gender-neutral. Using bi-polar scales from woman to man participants reported that overall the icons appeared to be more male-typed than gender-neutral. In Study 2, we investigated whether adding more female-typed icons would discourage or promote androcentric thinking. An online sample of 608 male and female participants (M age = 33.76) viewed either 12 avatar icons that reflected the over-representation of male-typed icons or 12 that included an equal number of male and female-typed icons. Participants were then asked to produce an example of a typical person. Finally, we measured political ideology on two liberal-conservative scales. We found evidence that exposure to an equal number of male-typed and female-typed avatar icons generated reactance among political conservatives, and thus may have constituted an ideological threat. Conservatives who saw an equal number of male-typed and female-typed icons were twice as likely to come up with a man as a typical person compared to conservatives who saw an over-representation of male-typed avatar icons. Consistent with system-justification theory, these findings show how male-centric thinking is also evident in a seemingly gender-neutral online context.