Sex stereotype assessment studies demonstrate that certain personality traits, such as assertiveness, are believed to occur more often among men, whereas other traits, such as passivity, are believed to occur more often among women. These stereotypic beliefs have been widely assumed to affect judgments of individuals. Surprisingly, an experiment conducted to test this assumption obtained no evidence for effects of sex stereotypes on subjects' judgments about a target individual. Instead, subjects' judgments were strongly influenced by behavioral information about the target. To explain these results, it is noted that the predicted effects of social stereotypes on judgments of individuals conform to Bayes' theorem for the normative use of prior probabilities in judgment tasks, inasmuch as stereotypic beliefs may be regarded as intuitive estimates for the probabilities of traits in social groups. Research in the psychology of prediction has demonstrated that people often neglect prior probabilities when making predictions about individuals, especially when they have individuating information about the person that is subjectively diagnostic of the criterion. An important implication of this research is that a minimal amount of subjectively diagnostic target case information should be sufficient to eradicate effects of stereotypes on judgments about individuals. A second experiment conducted to test this hypothesis supported the argument.Sex stereotypes have been measured off and significantly different mean ratings have been on for over 20 years, and the results have been conceptually similar across time and across quite consistent. Different studies of sex studies. In essence, the typical man is described stereotypes have all used a similar assessment as more assertive, active, objective, rational, format. In general, subjects have been pre-and competent than the typical woman; the sented with a list of personality traits and typical woman is described as more passive, asked to rate the extent to which each attri-emotional, submissive, compassionate, and bute is characteristic of the typical man and socially sensitive (Bern, 1974; Broverman, the typical woman. The attributes receiving Vogel,

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This article critically discusses theoretical and methodological issues raised by psychological androgyny research and theory. A number of problematic assumptions shared by this approach and the previous masculinity/femininity approach are detailed. The first part of the article considers whether inventories devised to tap general sex stereotypes should be used as individual personality measures. Alternative forms of cognitive structures, linking sex, other person features, and behavioral rules, are described and hypothesized to have sex-differentiating effects on behavior. The second part of the article discusses problems created by the persistent use of indicators of adaptation and mental health as criterion variables in research on sex identity and sex roles. It is suggested that a psychological theory of sex identity and sex roles should recognize the fact that sex is a structural feature of situations and of ongoing organizations of life experience. In a society in which sex plays a role in the very structuration of experience, the notion of psychological androgyny, with its implication of freedom from sex-related social and biological effects on personality and behavior, is arbitrary.

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