Dagmar Stahlberg

Masculine = Competent? Physical Appearance and Sex as Sources of Gender-Stereotypic Attributions

In two experiments, the influence of physical appearance and sex on the attribution of leadership competence was analyzed. Participants (male/female) reacted to stimulus persons from one of four groups varying in terms of sex (male/female) and physical appearance (feminine/masculine). The stimulus persons were introduced via photographs. Dependent measures referred to the attribution of leadership characteristics and were measured either directly via ratings or indirectly via a recognition test. In both experiments, participants attributed higher degrees of leadership competence to persons with typically masculine appearance than to persons with typically feminine appearance, regardless of the person’s sex. Only in the experiment with indirect measurement were male persons attributed a higher degree of leadership competence than female persons.

Name Your Favorite Musician: Effects of Masculine Generics and of their Alternatives in German

This article reports on two experiments waith native speakers of German that were conducted to determine the influence of different types of German generics on the cognitive inclusion of women. The results of these studies show that masculine versus other types of generics influence the retrieval of male and female exemplars from memory. This is the first piece of empirical evidence for this kind of effect with regard to the German language.

Effekte des generischen Maskulinums und alternativer Sprachformen auf den gedanklichen Einbezug von Frauen

Zusammenfassung. In der feministischen Linguistik wird angenommen, das maskuline Bezeichnungen, die generisch benutzt werden (Bezeichnungen von Personen beiderlei Geschlechts durch die maskuline Form, wie z.B. die Wissenschaftler, die Studenten), weibliche Personen weniger vorstellbar oder sichtbar machen als mannliche Personen. Verschiedene experimentelle Untersuchungen konnten diese Annahme fur den englischen Sprachraum bestatigen. Fur die deutsche Sprache existieren dagegen bislang sehr wenige Studien zu dieser Frage. Es werden vier Experimente vorgestellt, die untersuchen, ob unterschiedliche Sprachversionen - ,Beidnennung‘ (Studentinnen und Studenten), ,Neutral‘ (Studierende), ,Generisches Maskulinum‘ (Studenten) und “Groses I“ (StudentInnen) - den gedanklichen Einbezug von Frauen beeinflussen. Uber alle Experimente hinweg zeigte sich, das bei Personenreferenzen im generischen Maskulinum ein geringerer gedanklicher Einbezug von Frauen zu beobachten war als bei alternativen Sprachformen wie der Beidne...

Hindsight bias: Impaired memory or biased reconstruction?

The hindsight bias is the tendency for people to believe falsely that they would have predicted the outcome of an event, once the outcome is known. Although there is a rich literature on hindsight distortions, the underlying mechanisms are not yet fully understood. The present paper addresses the question whether hindsight distiortions represent the result of memory impairment or biased reconstruction processes. The majority of studies presented support the biased reconstruction view. Nevertheless, memory impairment processes cannot be ruled out as an explanation of hindsight bias when certain conditions are met, such as an existing coherent knowledge structure.

When autocratic leaders become an option—Uncertainty and self-esteem predict implicit leadership preferences.

We investigated the impact of uncertainty on leadership preferences and propose that the conjunction of self-esteem level and stability is an important moderator in this regard. Self-threatening uncertainty is aversive and activates the motivation to regain control. People with high and stable self-esteem should be confident of achieving this goal by self-determined amelioration of the situation and should therefore show a stronger preference for democratic leadership under conditions of uncertainty. By contrast, people with low and unstable self-esteem should place their trust and hope in the abilities of powerful others, resulting in a preference for autocratic leadership. Studies 1a and 1b validate explicit and implicit leadership measures and demonstrate a general prodemocratic default attitude under conditions of certainty. Studies 2 and 3 reveal a democratic reaction for individuals with stable high self-esteem and a submissive reaction for individuals with unstable low self-esteem under conditions of uncertainty. In Study 4, this pattern is cancelled out when individuals evaluate leadership styles from a leader instead of a follower perspective.

Cognitive effects of masculine generics in German: An overview of empirical findings

Abstract This article presents a series of experiments which were conducted among native speakers of German to determine the influence of different types of German generics on the cognitive inclusion of women. Results indicate that the inclusion of women is higher with ‘non-sexist’ alternatives than with masculine generics, a tendency which was consistent across different studies. The different alternatives, however, showed different effects which also varied depending on the context. These results are discussed with regard to their practical consequences in situations such as nominating women and men for awards or political offices.

Masculine = competent? The different impact of biological sex and physical appearance on the attribution of leadership competence

In two experiments, the influence of physical appearance and sex on the attribution of leadership competence was analyzed. Participants (male/female) reacted to stimulus persons from one of four groups varying in terms of sex (male/female) and physical appearance (feminine/masculine). The stimulus persons were introduced via photographs. Dependent measures referred to the attribution of leadership characteristics and were measured either directly via ratings or indirectly via a recognition test. In both experiments, participants attributed higher degrees of leadership competence to persons with typically masculine appearance than to persons with typically feminine appearance, regardless of the person’s sex. Only in the experiment with indirect measurement were male persons attributed a higher degree of leadership competence than female persons.

Effort reduction after self-control depletion: The role of cognitive resources in use of simple heuristics

Heuristics have been described as decision strategies that save time and effort. Given this advantageous property, heuristics should be more often used when cognitive resources are scarce. We tested this general view with respect to the fast and frugal recognition heuristic which assumes one-reason decision making based on recognition alone whenever one object in a paired comparison is recognised and the other is not. In an experiment, we manipulated cognitive resources through an executive control procedure previously used in ego-depletion research. From the choice frequencies, the probability of using the recognition heuristic was estimated by means of a multinomial processing tree model. Results confirmed that use of the recognition heuristic was indeed more likely under depleted resources and thus limited cognitive capacity. These findings corroborate the general notion that a need for effort reduction fosters use of simple decision heuristics.

Preferences for and evaluation of self-relevant information depending on the elaboration of the self-schemata involved

Previous findings have shown that some reactions (e.g. satisfaction with feedback) are guided by self-enhancement theory, whereas other reactions (e.g. perceived feedback accuracy) have been shown to follow predictions of self-consistency theory. The Integrative Self-Schema Model (ISSM) assumes that these effects should be moderated by the elaboration of the self-schema involved: This assumption was tested in an experimental study: 72 participants received fictitious feedback on different personality dimensions allegedly based on an adjective checklist. This feedback was either consistent with self-perceptions, more positive than expected, or more negative than expected, and addressed highly elaborated (schematic) or less elaborated (aschematic) personality dimensions. Satisfaction, feedback accuracy and interest in further information were analysed as dependent variables. The experimental results clearly confirmed the hypotheses derived from the ISSM for satisfaction and perceived feedback accuracy. A self-consistency effect regarding perceived feedback accuracy was found only for feedback on schematic dimensions but was attenuated on aschematic dimensions. A self-enhancement effect regarding satisfaction was found only on aschematic dimensions. This finding was reversed on schematic dimensions. Finally, interest in further information did not follow the predictions made by the ISSM.

Hindsight Bias in Gustatory Judgments

Being in hindsight, people tend to overestimate what they had known in foresight. This phenomenon has been studied for a wide variety of knowledge domains (e.g., episodes with uncertain outcomes, or solutions to almanac questions). As a result of these studies, hindsight bias turned out to be a robust phenomenon. In this paper, we present two experiments that successfully extended the domain of hindsight bias to gustatory judgments. Participants tasted different food items and were asked to estimate the quantity of a certain ingredient, for example, the residual sugar in a white wine. Judgments in both experiments were systematically biased towards previously presented low or high values that were labeled as the true quantities. Thus, hindsight bias can be considered a phenomenon that extends well beyond the judgment domains studied so far.