RESUMEN
We explore whether societal gender stereotypes re-emerge as social information is repeatedly passed from person to person. We examined whether peoples' memories of personality attributes associated with female and male social targets became increasingly consistent with societal gender stereotypes as information was passed down social transmission chains. After passing through the memories of just four generations of participants, our initially gender-balanced micro-societies became rife with traditional gender stereotypes. While we found some evidence of the re-emergence of gender stereotypes in Experiment 1, we found the effects were stronger when targets appeared in a feminine-stereotyped occupational context (Experiment 2), and a masculine-stereotyped occupational context (Experiment 3); conversely, the re-emergence of gender stereotypes was attenuated when targets appeared in a single gender context (Experiment 4). The current findings demonstrate that gender schematic memory bias, if widely shared, might cause gender stereotypes to be maintained through cultural evolution.
RESUMEN
There is abundant evidence that emotion categorization is influenced by the social category membership of target faces, with target sex and target race modulating the ease with which perceivers can categorize happy and angry emotional expressions. However, theoretical interpretation of these findings is constrained by gender and race imbalances in both the participant samples and target faces typically used when demonstrating these effects (e.g., most participants have been White women and most Black targets have been men). Across seven experiments, the current research used gender-matched samples (Experiments 1a and 1b), gender- and racial identity-matched samples (Experiments 2a and 2b), and manipulations of social context (Experiments 3a, 3b, and 4) to establish whether emotion categorization is influenced by interactions between the social category membership of perceivers and target faces. Supporting this idea, we found the presence and size of the happy face advantage were influenced by interactions between perceivers and target social categories, with reliable happy face advantages in reaction times for ingroup targets but not necessarily for outgroup targets. White targets and female targets were the only categories associated with a reliable happy face advantage that was independent of perceiver category. The interactions between perceiver and target social category were eliminated when targets were blocked by social category (e.g., a block of all White female targets; Experiments 3a and 3b) and accentuated when targets were associated with additional category information (i.e., ingroup/outgroup nationality; Experiment 4). These findings support the possibility that contextually sensitive intergroup processes influence emotion categorization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
