An ambivalent alliance. Hostile and benevolent sexism as complementary justifications for gender inequality.

The equation of prejudice with antipathy is challenged by recent research on sexism. Benevolent sexism (a subjectively favorable, chivalrous ideology that offers protection and affection to women who embrace conventional roles) coexists with hostile sexism (antipathy toward women who are viewed as usurping men's power). The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, first validated in U.S. samples, has been administered to over 15,000 men and women in 19 nations. Hostile and benevolent sexism are complementary, cross-culturally prevalent ideologies, both of which predict gender inequality. Women, as compared with men, consistently reject hostile sexism but often endorse benevolent sexism (especially in the most sexist cultures). By rewarding women for conforming to a patriarchal status quo, benevolent sexism inhibits gender equality. More generally, affect toward minority groups is often ambivalent, but subjectively positive stereotypes are not necessarily benign.

Beyond prejudice as simple antipathy: hostile and benevolent sexism across cultures.

The authors argue that complementary hostile and benevolent components of sexism exist across cultures. Male dominance creates hostile sexism (HS), but men's dependence on women fosters benevolent sexism (BS)--subjectively positive attitudes that put women on a pedestal but reinforce their subordination. Research with 15,000 men and women in 19 nations showed that (a) HS and BS are coherent constructs that correlate positively across nations, but (b) HS predicts the ascription of negative and BS the ascription of positive traits to women, (c) relative to men, women are more likely to reject HS than BS, especially when overall levels of sexism in a culture are high, and (d) national averages on BS and HS predict gender inequality across nations. These results challenge prevailing notions of prejudice as an antipathy in that BS (an affectionate, patronizing ideology) reflects inequality and is a cross-culturally pervasive complement to HS.

The motivated tactician's juggling act: compatible vs. incompatible impression goals.

This study examines how perceivers negotiate multiple, and sometimes incompatible, impression formation goals. Previous research typically presents perceivers with a single impression goal (e.g. accuracy, supporting preferred beliefs), and does not consider how perceivers juggle multiple goals. The processes of perceivers with multiple compatible goals should show uncomplicated impression formation processes, that is, strategic use of particular target attributes (e.g. negative) that suit their purposes. Perceivers with incompatible goals, in contrast, should be less selective, and form more complex impressions that reflect all types of attributes. In this experiment, perceivers with compatible goals paid less attention to target attributes, systematically biased their interpretation of those attributes, and ultimately formed less complex impressions than individuals with incompatible goals. How multiple impression goals are prioritized is discussed.

Controlling other people. The impact of power on stereotyping.

This article presents a theory of the mutually reinforcing interaction between power and stereotyping, mediated by attention. The powerless attend to the powerful who control their outcomes, in an effort to enhance prediction and control, so forming complex, potentially nonstereotypic impressions. The powerful pay less attention, so are more vulnerable to stereotyping. The powerful (a) need not attend to the other to control their own outcomes, (b) cannot attend because they tend to be attentionally overloaded, and (c) if they have high need for dominance, may not want to attend. Stereotyping and power are mutually reinforcing because stereotyping itself exerts control, maintaining and justifying the status quo. Two legal cases and a body of research illustrate the theory and suggest organizational change strategies.

Thinking is for doing: portraits of social cognition from daguerreotype to laserphoto.

From the outset, perspectives on social cognition have taken an emphatically pragmatic stance, as evident in early writing by James, Allport, Bruner, Asch, Heider, Tagiuri, and Jones. After a hiatus, during which social cognition research neglected its proper attunement to social behavior, researchers again are emphasizing that thinking is for doing, that social understanding operates in the service of social interaction. Early and recent (but not intermediate) theories have reflected a pragmatic orientation in 3 recurring themes: People are good-enough social perceivers; people construct meaning through traits, stereotypes, and stories; and people's thinking strategies depend on their goals. The pragmatic viewpoint again opens up new areas for research and theory in social cognition.

Personality feedback and situational norms can control stereotyping processes.

Impressions are influenced by motivations stemming primarily from the target (e.g., interdependence), 3rd parties (e.g., accountability or time pressure), or the self. The current studies investigate motivations stemming primarily from the self. In Study 1, Ss were given dispositional feedback about their abilities to categorize or to individuate. In Study 2, they were given situational information about the appropriate norms to categorize or to individuate. As predicted, dispositional feedback influenced low self-monitors, and situational information influenced high self-monitors. Both altered attention to potentially individuating category-inconsistent attributes as well as requests for additional information. Causal models further illuminated the mediating processes. These results suggest that people's flexible self-concepts are an important source of motivation in impression formation.

Confusing one person with another: what errors reveal about the elementary forms of social relations.

Seven studies investigated the cognitive structure of social relationships exhibited in the patterns of substitutions that occur when people confuse a person with another. The studies investigated natural errors in which people called a familiar person by the wrong name, misremembered with whom they had interacted, or mistakenly directed an action at an inappropriate person. These studies tested the relational-models theory of A. P. Fiske (1990b, 1991) that people use 4 basic models for social relationships. All 7 studies provide support for the theory; Ss tend to confuse people with whom they interact in the same basic relationship mode. In addition, Ss confuse people of the same gender. Other factors (age, race, role term, similarity of names) generally have smaller, less reliable effects, indicating that the 4 elementary modes of relationships are among the most salient schemata in everyday social cognition.

Interpersonal competition can cause individuating processes.

Two experiments investigated whether competitors attend to and individuate opponents. Interdependence theories predict that people individuate others on whom their outcomes depend rather than stereotyping them; this has been tested for cooperative but not for competitive interdependence. Competition separates such phenomena as unit formation in cooperation from interdependence per se, posited to be the crucial variable. In two experiments, Ss expected to compete or not compete with a competent or incompetent fictitious subject. Ss commented into a tape recorder about the person's attributes, some inconsistent and some consistent with expectations. As predicted, competitors (a) increased attention to inconsistencies, (b) drew more dispositional inferences about inconsistencies, and (c) formed more varied impressions. The role of competition in undercutting expectancy-based impressions and intergroup vs. interpersonal competition are discussed.

Motivational influences on impression formation: outcome dependency, accuracy-driven attention, and individuating processes.

How might being outcome dependent on another person influence the processes that one uses to form impressions of that person? We designed three experiments to investigate this question with respect to short-term, task-oriented outcome dependency. In all three experiments, subjects expected to interact with a young man formerly hospitalized as a schizophrenic, and they received information about the person's attributes in either written profiles or videotapes. In Experiment 1, short-term, task-oriented outcome dependency led subjects to use relatively individuating processes (i.e., to base their impressions of the patient on his particular attributes), even under conditions that typically lead subjects to use relatively category-based processes (i.e., to base their impressions on the patient's schizophrenic label). Moreover, in the conditions that elicited individuating processes, subjects spent more time attending to the patient's particular attribute information. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the attention effects in Experiment 1 were not merely a function of impression positivity and that outcome dependency did not influence the impression formation process when attribute information in addition to category-level information was unavailable. Finally, Experiment 3 manipulated not outcome dependency but the attentional goal of forming an accurate impression. We found that accuracy-driven attention to attribute information also led to individuating processes. The results of the three experiments indicate that there are important influences of outcome dependency on impression formation. These results are consistent with a model in which the tendency for short-term, task-oriented outcome dependency to facilitate individuating impression formation processes is mediated by an increase in accuracy-driven attention to attribute information.