Subject(s)
Biological Evolution , Genetics, Behavioral , Sex Characteristics , Social Behavior , Courtship , Cross-Cultural Comparison , Female , Gender Identity , Humans , MaleABSTRACT
Many theories of the effects of attitudes on memory for attitude-relevant information would predict that attitudinally congenial information should be more memorable than uncongenial information. Yet, this meta-analysis showed that this congeniality effect is inconsistent across the experiments in this research literature and small when these effects are aggregated. The tendency of the congeniality effect to decrease over the years spanned by this literature appeared to reflect the weaker methods used in the earlier studies. The effect was stronger in 2 kinds of earlier experiments that may be tinged with artifact: those in which the coding of recall measures was not known to be blind and those that used recognition measures that were not corrected for bias. Nonetheless, several additional characteristics of the studies moderated the congeniality effect and suggested that both attitude structure and motivation to process attitude-relevant information are relevant to understanding the conditions under which people have superior memory for attitudinally congenial or uncongenial information.
Subject(s)
Attitude , Mental Recall , Motivation , HumansSubject(s)
Social Behavior , Social Perception , Biological Evolution , Female , Humans , Male , Models, Psychological , Sex CharacteristicsABSTRACT
This article presents a synthesis of research on the relative effectiveness of women and men who occupy leadership and managerial roles. Aggregated over the organizational and laboratory experimental studies in the sample, male and female leaders were equally effective. However, consistent with the assumption that the congruence of leadership roles with leaders' gender enhances effectiveness, men were more effective than women in roles that were defined in more masculine terms, and women were more effective than men in roles that were defined in less masculine terms. Also, men were more effective than women to the extent that leader and subordinate roles were male-dominated numerically. These and other findings are discussed from the perspective of social-role theory of sex differences in social behavior as well as from alternative perspectives.
