Experimental Study On The Gender Stereotype In Advertising Information Processing

Stereotype is a central field in recent implicit social cognitive research. As one important branch of stereotype, the gender stereotype embodies the fixed cognitive pattern of past experience toward men and women. It is also a subjective perception about "how men or women should do", including a stereotypic understanding about the character, image, intelligence, social division work, and domestic role of men and women. Advertisement is a particular media; it is not only the important tool for reflecting and cultivating of gender stereotype, but also offers the wider space and more projecting focus for disputation of gender stereotypic viewpoint. Based on the theory related to social cognition and information processing, through systematically probing into the content, processing pattern and effect on the advertising transmission of the gender stereotypic information in advertisement, and revalidating the applicability of the Process Dissociation Procedure ( PDP) and Implicit Association Test ( IAT ), the study aims to provide some references for theoretical enrichment of stereotype, methodological consummation of indirect measurement technique and practical advance of advertising transmission.The study consists of one pretest and three serial experiments. The pretest confirms that gender stereotype exists in the advertisements, and then examines its content. The first experiment deals with the processing pattern of the gender stereotypic information in advertisements. The second experiment tests the implicit operational intensity of the gender stereotypic information in advertisements. Based on two previous experiments, the third experiment probes into the influence of gender stereotypic information processing on the advertising transmission effect. Concretely, it is divided into two sub-experiments to investigate respectively the interaction between the gender stereotype and the advertisements' presentation mode, advertisements' presentation time span and advertisements word's presentation mode. The main results suggest that:1 Gender stereotype exists in the advertisements. The content is, in the advertisements, men are frequently matched with the scientific or productive or authoritative products while women are usually taken as the spokesman of the life-giving or consumptive or service products. Such content implies the traditional viewpoint that men should belong to the world but women should belong to the family or men are central in life while women are the accessorial part.2 The processing of gender stereotypic information in advertisements is acomprehensive result of the automatic processing and controlled processing. The stereotypic priming reduces to more automatic processing but counter-stereotypic priming reduces to more controlled processing. The levels of distracted attention influences the controlled processing rather than automatic processing.3 The processing of gender stereotypic information in advertisements has powerful implicit operational intensity; and also, subjects with strong stereotype have more strict judgment criterion to the gender stereotypic information in advertisements.4 The interactions between the gender stereotype and the advertisements' presentation mode, advertisements' presentation time span and advertisements word's presentation mode are showed. The interactions' way would be different as the characteristics of language materials presented with the advertisements change.5 PDP is confirmed to be an effective tool for the research on gender stereotypic information processing in the advertisements. IAT also can be used to measure the implicit effect of gender stereotype in advertisements, but its validity weaken when choosing pictures as the experimental materials.