| For the last 40 years, research on gender roles in the U.S. has consistently implied that women are expected to be more persuadable than men. A great deal of evidence also suggests that role expectations of this sort exert powerful effects on the self-concept, goals, behaviors, and attitudes of role occupants. However, laboratory studies on the effect of gender on persuasion have produced inconsistent results, with experimental psychologists sometimes reporting gender differences and other times not. The aim of the current research is to propose and test one means by which sex differences in persuasion may arise. Specifically, I hypothesize that gender differences in persuadability can be produced by chronic or short-lived sex role salience. Study 1 replicates and extends research on sex role norms, showing that women in the U.S. are indeed expected to be more open to attitude change than men. Studies 2-5 provide evidence for the broad hypothesis that gender differences in attitude strength exist reliably in the U.S. population despite being inconsistent in the laboratory. Studies 6 and 7 experimentally manipulate sex role salience and measure attitude strength, finding that cognitively activating the female sex role leads to reductions in attitude strength and openness to attitude change via the low-thought strategy of agreeing with advocacies. Last, Studies 8-10 test the extent to which these sex role norms are the product of the sex-segregated division of labor in the U.S., in which men occupy more high-power roles than women. The implications of sex role salience and the gendered division of labor for prior and future research on attitudes are discussed. |
