| The present research examined the favorability of implicit attitudes toward women and men, with a focus on four questions: What role does group membership play in determining such attitudes? Are effects of group membership moderated by cultural construals of the group? What is the relation between implicit and explicit gender attitudes? Are implicit attitudes susceptible to intervention? Four preliminary experiments measured male and female participants' implicit attitudes toward varying construals of women and men, using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Overall, participants showed more favorable implicit attitudes toward women than toward men. However, this effect was far more pronounced in female participants than in male participants, a finding that Eagly and her colleagues did not reliably obtain in their research using explicit measures of attitude. Additionally, attitudes were affected by the specific construal of the gender groups being evaluated (i.e., mothers vs. fathers, women vs. men, female leaders vs. male leaders). Across all construals, female participants showed strong favorability toward the category female (relative to male), regardless of the particular construal of the category. Male participants, however, showed weaker preferences overall and less valence-consistency in their gender attitudes. These findings drive the conclusion that group membership (i.e., one's own sex) and cultural construal (i.e., the culture's assessment that female = good) both play an important role in defining implicit gender attitudes. Experiment I examined the consequences of the valence consistency of attitudes toward women and men. This experiment replicated the participant sex effect observed in the four preliminary experiments. More importantly, there was a stronger link between implicit attitudes and explicit candidate preferences among women (the group showing greater valence-consistency) than among men. In Experiment 2, participant sex differences in implicit attitudes toward women were again replicated. Importantly, a mild attempt to influence the strength of implicit association between the concepts weak and female and between strong and male (by asking participants to spend five minutes writing an essay about strong women leaders) was successful. Imagining strong women leaders led both male and female participants equally to show a reduction in the implicit stereotype that female = weak and male = strong. The influence of the intervention was, however, restricted to a change in implicit stereotype; it did not influence women's or men's implicit gender attitudes, suggesting that the two processes, implicit attitude and stereotype, may function independently. |
