Susanne Bruckmüller

The glass cliff: When and why women are selected as leaders in crisis contexts

The glass cliff refers to women being more likely to rise to positions of organizational leadership in times of crisis than in times of success, and men being more likely to achieve those positions in prosperous times. We examine the role that (a) a gendered history of leadership and (b) stereotypes about gender and leadership play in creating the glass cliff. In Expt 1, participants who read about a company with a male history of leadership selected a male future leader for a successful organization, but chose a female future leader in times of crisis. This interaction--between company performance and gender of the preferred future leader--was eliminated for a counter-stereotypic history of female leadership. In Expt 2, stereotypically male attributes were most predictive of leader selection in a successful organization, while stereotypically female attributes were most predictive in times of crisis. Differences in the endorsement of these stereotypes, in particular with regard to the ascription of lower stereotypically female attributes to the male candidate mediated the glass cliff effect. Overall, results suggest that stereotypes about male leadership may be more important for the glass cliff effect than stereotypes about women and leadership.

Comparison Focus in Intergroup Comparisons: Who We Compare to Whom Influences Who We See as Powerful and Agentic

In intergroup comparisons one group usually becomes the implicit norm that other groups are compared to. Three studies address the consequences that the direction of the comparison has for perceptions of the compared groups. For real groups (Experiment 1) and fictitious groups (Experiments 2 and 3) participants perceived a group as more powerful and higher in status when it had been the norm rather than the effect to be explained in a text comparing two groups. Moreover, norm groups and their “typical” members were perceived as more agentic and less communal than comparison groups, and these attributions were mediated by the ascription of power. The authors conclude that systematic ways of explaining one group rather than another could serve as a subtle tool to perpetuate the status quo of intergroup power relations.

When do past events require explanation? Insights from social psychology

Some past events incite more wonder about their causes than do others. For example, negative events require explanation more than positive events. We review social psychologists’ theoretical and empirical insights on what kinds of past events “beg explanation.” We draw on attribution theory that became popular among psychologists from the 1960s onward, on research on counterfactual reasoning, and on conversational and discursive critiques of attribution theory. We argue that factors predicting what is or is not perceived as requiring explanation are culturally and historically grounded, and that accordingly, what begs explanation varies between contexts and can change over time. Yet, drawing on the distinction between content and process, we argue that there are recognizable patterns across time and space. Specifically, we propose the relationship between events and background expectations as a rather stable predictor of what begs explanation—and as a level of analysis that can unite seemingly disparate approaches.

Singled Out as the Effect to be Explained Implications for Collective Self-Esteem

The description and explanation of intergroup differences tend to be framed in terms of how nonnormative (untypical and/or stigmatized) groups differ from normative groups rather than vice versa. Three experiments examined how this affects group members’ collective self-esteem. Single participants felt worse about being single when they read (Study 1) or wrote (Study 2) about how singles differ from coupled people than when they read or wrote about how coupled people differ from singles—although they mentioned more positive aspects of being single under the former comparative framing. In Study 3, left-handed participants indicated lower private collective self-esteem after writing about how left-handers differ from right-handers than after writing about how right-handers differ from left-handers. Thus, regardless of the specific characteristics that the comparison focused on, being marked as different and having to explain one’s group identity negatively affected members of nonnormative, but not members of normative groups.