Seeing is believing: Exposure to counterstereotypic women leaders and its effect on the malleability of automatic gender stereotyping

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Abstract

Two studies tested the conditions under which social environments can undermine automatic gender stereotypic beliefs expressed by women. Study 1, a laboratory experiment, manipulated exposure to biographical information about famous female leaders. Study 2, a year-long field study, took advantage of pre-existing differences in the proportion of women occupying leadership positions (e.g., female professors) in two naturally occurring environments—a women’s college and a coeducational college. Together, these studies investigated: (a) whether exposure to women in leadership positions can temporarily undermine women’s automatic gender stereotypic beliefs, and (b) whether this effect is mediated by the frequency with which female leaders are encountered. Results revealed first that when women were in social contexts that exposed them to female leaders, they were less likely to express automatic stereotypic beliefs about their ingroup (Studies 1 and 2). Second, Study 2 showed that the long-term effect of social environments (women’s college vs. coed college) on automatic gender stereotyping was mediated by the frequency of exposure to women leaders (i.e., female faculty). Third, some academic environments (e.g., classes in male-dominated disciplines like science and math) produced an increase in automatic stereotypic beliefs among students at the coed college but not at the women’s college—importantly, this effect was mediated by the sex of the course instructors. Together, these findings underscore the power of local environments in shaping women’s nonconscious beliefs about their ingroup.

Introduction

“[Attitudes] are often as rigid as habits…They are so saving of time and mental effort that they often persist throughout life in a way in which they were fixed in childhood or in youth. An attitude is retained as long as it satisfies the individual, but it is likely to be modified under the provocation of serious affective disorganization…When in a crisis old attitudes are found to be worthless they no longer offer effective resistance to the new. Conversion, the shock of grief, economic disaster, and falling in love are typical occasions during which old attitudes are abandoned and new attitudes come into being.”

“Attitudes are not merely constant dispositions to repeat precisely the same act in the same way when the same stimulus recurs in an old or new context. They are variable in the behavior they produce, and stable only in their significance…In modern psychology it has become difficult to picture an attitude as residing in specified neural grooves, capable of activation only in an invariable way through stimuli that are always the same. It is now recognized that stimuli are never twice the same, and that the neural process is one of dynamic interplay rather than of mechanical rigidity.”

The quotes above provide two very different conceptions of the nature of attitude and belief. The first defines them as stable mental representations that develop early and change rarely and the second describes them as malleable and context-dependent. Interestingly, both were written by the same person, Gordon Allport, in his 1935 chapter in A Handbook of Social Psychology. Allport was not alone in theorizing that attitudes and beliefs can be both malleable and stable. He and other social scientists of his time attempted to reconcile these two, often opposing, theoretical views by making a distinction between “general attitudes” that evoke a generalized response tendency from “specific attitudes” that often take precedence and guide behavior at any given time or situation (Allport, 1935, p. 822; Bogardus, 1931, p. 54; Dewey, 1922, p. 42; Krueger & Reckless, 1931, p. 270). Questions about the stability versus malleability of attitudes and beliefs, evident in the early psychological literature but largely dormant for the next 50 years, have re-emerged in theories and empirical research in recent decades (Smith, 1998; Smith & Zarate, 1992; Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000).

Are attitudes and beliefs stable, as suggested by several classic and contemporary theories, or are they considerably more malleable depending on individuals’ state of mind and their social context? In the last two decades numerous studies have demonstrated that self-reported attitudes and beliefs vary considerably as a function of changes in people’s internal states (e.g., thoughts, feelings, and motivations; Chaiken & Yates, 1985; Forgas, 1992; Petty, Schumann, Richman, & Strathman, 1993; Schwarz & Clore, 1983; Wilson & Hodges, 1992) and changes in their social environment (e.g., salience of social norms, who is present in the situation, who is asking the question; Feldman & Lynch, 1988; Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986; Hatchett & Schuman, 1975).

With the recent advent of theories of nonconscious processes, especially as they relate to judgments of historically disadvantaged social groups, similar questions have arisen about the relative malleability of automatic compared to controlled beliefs and attitudes (Banaji & Dasgupta, 1998; Bargh, 1999; Devine, 1989; Greenwald et al., 2002; Wilson et al., 2000). Specifically, if automatic attitudes and beliefs operate without perceivers’ awareness, control, or intention, does it mean that such cognitions are resistant to change in the short term (Bargh, 1999; Devine, 1989; Wilson et al., 2000), or are they more flexible than previously imagined? This question is important for both theoretical and practical purposes. In terms of theory, research addressing this issue has the potential to refine contemporary conceptions of automaticity and contemporary theories of stereotype and prejudice reduction by shedding light on whether and when internal and external cues (motivation, attention, and situational stimuli) can modulate automatic processes. In terms of practical importance, such research has the potential to lead to the development of interventions that may alleviate the subtle but frequent automatic biases in thought and behavior that have been widely documented in social psychology (for reviews see Banaji, 2001; Blair, 2001; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Fazio & Towles-Schwen, 1999).

In the past few years more than 40 studies have accumulated that collectively demonstrate the sensitivity of automatic attitudes and beliefs, even those that typically operate without people’s control, to a wide range of motivational, strategic, and contextual influences (for a review see Blair, 2002). Some of these studies demonstrate that automatic responses are rendered malleable when people are spurred by specific motivations (e.g., Lowery, Hardin, & Sinclair, 2001; Sinclair & Kunda, 1999; Spencer, Fein, Wolfe, Fong, & Dunn, 1998) or when people invest the effort to practice specific strategies to avoid stereotypic or prejudicial responses (e.g., Blair, Ma, & Lenton, 2001; Gollwitzer & Schaal, 1998; Kawakami, Dovidio, Moll, Hermsen, & Russin, 2000). By comparison, other studies demonstrate that automatic beliefs and attitudes can also be modified by changing the social context that people inhabit rather than by directly manipulating their goals, motivation, or effort (e.g., Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001; Macrae, Bodenhausen, & Milne, 1995; Wittenbrink, Judd, & Park, 2001). As a case in point, Dasgupta and Greenwald (2001) found that when perceivers were incidentally exposed to admired African Americans and disliked European Americans they expressed significantly less automatic race bias than others exposed to non-racial exemplars or to admired White and disliked Black exemplars. Importantly, the reduction in race bias endured for 24 hours beyond the manipulation. Moreover, this strategy was not confined to race but also applied to attitudes toward other groups targeted by prejudice, such as the elderly.

Using Dasgupta and Greenwald’s paradigm, we sought to further elaborate the conditions under which exposure to admired and counterstereotypic individuals can reduce automatic biases, and identify the underlying mechanism by which it happens. Specifically, we focused on the following issues. First, because Dasgupta and Greenwald’s (2001) research concentrated only on the flexibility of automatic attitudes (i.e., prejudice), it remained unclear whether their contextual manipulation would produce similar effects on automatic beliefs (i.e., stereotypes) about groups.1 This issue is important because although attitudes and beliefs about the same target sometimes overlap considerably (e.g., negative attitudes about African Americans are related to negative racial stereotypes), at other times they clearly part company (e.g., attitudes about women are largely positive despite pernicious stereotypes about the social roles deemed “appropriate” for women; Eagly, Makhijani, & Klonsky, 1992; Eagly & Mladinic, 1989; Eagly, Mladinic, & Otto, 1991). Thus, the first goal of the present research was to examine whether exposure to counterstereotypic members of a particular social group—both over the short-term and over a longer period of time—can undermine people’s automatic stereotypic beliefs about that group. Whereas earlier studies concentrated on people’s perceptions of outgroups, in this research we focused specifically on their perceptions of ingroups (i.e., women).

Second, we propose that the influence of counterstereotypic situational cues on the malleability of automatic stereotyping may not be a categorical effect but rather a continuous one. In other words, the more frequently counterstereotypic exemplars occur in the social environment the greater may be the decrement in automatic stereotyping. Indeed, theories of construct accessibility and category representation propose the more frequently a construct or exemplar is activated, the more accessible it becomes and the more likely it is to influence subsequent judgments (Higgins & King, 1981; Nosofsky, 1988; Smith & DeCoster, 1998; Smith & Zarate, 1992; Srull & Wyer, 1980). Applying these theories to automatic beliefs about social groups, our second goal was to test whether the frequency of exposure to counterstereotypic individuals mediates the magnitude of automatic stereotype reduction.

Third, studies on the influence of admired exemplars on implicit social cognition have focused almost exclusively on laboratory tests of conditions that promote the malleability of automatic beliefs and attitudes (for an exception see Rudman, Ashmore, & Gary, 2001, who examined the influence of a particular college course on automatic racial attitudes). In the spirit of “full-cycle research” (Cialdini, 1980),2 the third goal of the present research was to test the external validity of the predicted findings by examining whether exposure to counterstereotypic ingroup members in a naturally occurring social environment also affects people’s automatic beliefs about their ingroup. A prominent example of an environment that actively promotes counterstereotypic gender roles is a women’s college. Indeed, women’s colleges are based on the premise that given the pervasiveness of gender stereotypes in individual cognition and in social institutions, a radically different environment is needed—where women (atypically) occupy the majority of leadership roles—to ensure women’s development in non-traditional professions (Eccles, 1994; Eccles & Jacobs, 1986; Riordan, 1994; Solnick, 1995; Tidball, 1980, Tidball, 1985; Tidball & Kistiakowsky, 1976). This idea fits well with Eagly’s social role theory that argues gender stereotypes are learned and maintained by people’s observations of the unequal distribution of women and men in various social roles (Eagly & Steffen, 1984), and that these beliefs change when people notice that women occupy more counterstereotypic roles (Diekman & Eagly, 2000).

Tidball, Smith, Tidball, and Wolf-Wendel (1999) and Eccles, 1994, Eccles and Jacobs, 1986 have shown a strong link between the frequency of counterstereotypic female role models on campus (e.g., faculty, administrators, and peers) and the cultivation of students’ commitment to counterstereotypic professions at women’s colleges. In 1993, 45.5% of the mathematics and science faculty at women’s colleges were female compared to 11.4% at coeducational colleges and 4.6% at technical institutes (Sebrechts, 1993). Using matched samples or after controlling for potential confounding variables (e.g., social class, SAT scores, and geographical region), studies have found that: (a) compared to female students at coeducational colleges, students at women’s colleges are more likely to change majors from female-dominated disciplines to neutral or male-dominated disciplines (Solnick, 1995); (b) women’s college graduates are more likely to attain high-end professional positions and incomes 3–10 years after graduation (Riordan, 1990, Riordan, 1994); and (c) women’s college graduates are more likely to choose professions in which women are underrepresented such as medicine (Tidball, 1985), and other sciences (Tidball & Kistiakowsky, 1976) compared to female graduates of coeducational institutions. Although some studies reveal no differences between graduates of the two types of colleges (Giele, 1987; Stoecker & Pascarella, 1991), the number and variety of studies showing group differences lend credence to the hypothesis that greater exposure to counterstereotypic women at women’s colleges compared to equivalent coeducational colleges is likely to affect female students’ beliefs about gender. Thus, the third goal of the present research was to conduct a longitudinal study investigating whether female students’ automatic and controlled beliefs about their ingroup are influenced by the frequency with which they meet counterstereotypic female role models in their first year at a women’s college versus a comparable coeducational college.3

In summary, two studies were designed to extend previous theory and research by assessing whether exposure to famous women in counterstereotypic leadership positions can undermine women’s automatic stereotypes about their ingroup. Study 1, conducted in the laboratory, investigated whether reading biographies of famous women who are scientists, judges, business leaders, etc. can temporarily undermine the automatic activation of the stereotype that women are better suited for supportive roles than leadership roles. Moreover, we explored participants’ reactions to the female leaders, particularly their level of identification with them and the degree to which they thought the leaders’ success could be attained by other ingroup members including themselves. Finally, we measured the effect of women leaders on participants’ explicit beliefs about gender.

Exposure to female leaders, which was experimentally manipulated in Study 1, was replaced in Study 2 by two naturally occurring environments—a women’s college and a coeducational college—that differ significantly in the proportion of women who occupy counterstereotypic leadership positions as faculty, college president, deans, etc. Our first goal in Study 2 was to determine whether the primary prediction tested in the laboratory would generalize to a field setting. The second goal was to identify specific features of the environment that may be responsible for these belief changes. We predicted that the effect of the campus environment on changes in automatic gender stereotyping ought to be mediated by the frequency of encounters with women in leadership roles (especially women faculty). Finally, we measured the effect of the college environment on participants’ explicit beliefs about gender.

Section snippets

Study 1

During the experimental session participants completed two ostensibly unrelated studies. Under the guise of the “first study,” they were either exposed to pictures and biographical descriptions of famous women in leadership roles or to pictures and descriptions of flowers. Those who saw women leaders also completed a questionnaire assessing the degree to which they identified with those leaders and the degree to which they perceived the individuals’ success as attainable for themselves and for

Study 2

Thus far, our investigation of the impact of counterstereotypic individuals on women’s automatic beliefs has been confined to the laboratory where variables can be manipulated and controlled with ease. Despite the many advantages of laboratory research, we believe it is also important to investigate this phenomenon in a naturally occurring setting in order to test whether encountering counterstereotypic female leaders in everyday life affects women’s automatic beliefs about gender. Thus, the

General discussion

Both the laboratory study and the field study reported in this paper converge on the same message—women’s automatic stereotypic beliefs about their ingroup can be undermined if they inhabit local environments in which women frequently occupy counterstereotypic leadership roles.

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