Study Of The Effects Of Ambivalent Sexism On Gender-based Inter-group Helping

Inter-group helping refers to helping behaviors take place between members of different groups.Nadler proposes a model called Inter-group Helping Relations as Power Relations Model which considers groups will establish or challenge existing dominance through helping.Helping can be divided into autonomy-oriented help and dependency-oriented help according to its nature.Among them,dependency-oriented help is considered as a mechanism which maintains current power relations and social domination.Male and female groups are most common groups divided by gender and there is a clear hierarchical relationship.Previous researches suggested benevolent sexism increases engagement in dependency-oriented cross-gender helping.Benevolent sexism is one of ambivalent sexism which regards women in a positive attitude but in order to restrict women to traditional gender roles essentially.The opposite is an emotion and attitude called hostile sexism which is hostile to women overtly.Previous researches have suggested the relationship between benevolent sexism and inter-group helping based gender.However,there is no relevant research at home at present.Previous investigations discovered that the level of sexism people endorsed differ among different cultural backgrounds and average level of sexism will influence people’s preference for different forms of sexism.In the context of Chinese culture,could the ambivalent sexism still predict the provision of dependency-oriented help?This is one of questions which we want to explore.On the other hand,in everyday life,inter-group helping take place between two or more individuals in most cases.Since inter-group helping take place in the form of inter-personal helping,when individualshave different interpersonal perceptions about the recipients,whether the impact of ambivalent sexism on dependency-oriented help will change or not? This is the other questions we want to explore.The first study uses questionnaire to explore the influence of participants’ endorsement of ambivalent sexism on gender based inter-group helping.We take gender of targets who receive help as a within-subjects variable and measure the ambivalent sexism of the participates as well as their tendency of providing help to the different genders of targets who receive help.The results indicated that benevolent sexism attitude male endorsed predicts the tendency of males’ provision of dependency-oriented help to females only.The second study uses experimentation to explore the influence of participants’ endorsement of ambivalent sexism on gender based inter-group helping.We take gender of targets who receive help as a between-subjects variable.We expose participants to different types of sexism and measure their tendency of providing dependency-oriented help.The results indicated that when exposed to benevolent sexism beliefs,males increase their tendency to provide dependency-oriented help to females only.The third study explores the influence of participants’ endorsement of ambivalent sexism on gender based inter-group helping and the role of interpersonal perception in it.This study includes two parts,a pre-experiment and a formal experiment.The pre-experiment is aimed at working out descriptive materials which can demonstrate the targets who receive help are high warmth and high competence,high warmth and low competence,low warmth and high competence,low warmth and low competence according to the Stereotype Content Model.The formal experiment adopts the method of a combination of questionnaire and experiment.We take gender of targets who receive help as a between-subjects variable and require the participants read one of the four categories of the descriptions of male or female acquaintances which divided according to the Stereotype Content Model in order to prime them with different interpersonal perceptions of acquaintances.Then,we measure participants’ tendency to provide dependency-oriented help to acquaintances.The results indicated that benevolent sexism attitude male endorsed predicts the tendency of males’ provision of dependency-oriented help to females,in which men perceived women’s competence and the extent to which women conform to the role of traditional gender roles play moderating roles.Our investigation indicated that,it is still benevolent sexism attitude male endorsed predicts the tendency of males’ provision of dependency-oriented help to females in China.Besides,when males perceive the female who need help iscompetent,their masculine identity as a dominant group are threatened.To mitigate this threat,benevolent sexism males endorsed plays a defensive role through emphasizing the weak position of females,thus providing more dependency-oriented help so as to maintain the dominant position of the male group they belonged to.When males perceive the female who need help is conformed to traditional gender roles,benevolent sexism males endorsed arouse their sympathy and compassion and encourage them praise female by providing them with dependency-oriented help.So that,females will be further restricted in the traditional gender roles.