Salience of sexual identity was varied in intergroup interaction for 75 female and 77 male college students. Participants rated attraction for and made attributions of sex-linked personality traits to men and women presented on slides. Under conditions of high as compared to low group salience, own group members were rated as more attractive than other group members, men made greater use of the male competence stereotype and women made greater use of the female warmth stereotype. These findings were interpreted as consistent with a social comparison interpretation of intergroup interaction.

Two experiments tested the meaning change model's prediction for the effect of trait ambiguity on impression formation. Participants were all college students, 43 males and 29 females in Experiment 1 and 20 males and 28 females in Experiment 2. Standard impression formation tasks were used. The results revealed greater context effects for high as compared to low ambiguous traits and greater influence on description ratings for low as compared to high ambigous traits, supporting the meaning change model. When ratings of descriptions and of individual traits were clearly separated, context effects were observed only for low ambiguous traits. The implications of this finding for meaning change and information integration models of impression formation are discussed

Demographic, educational, and research information was abstracted from vitas of 183 applicants for Assistant Professor social psychology positions in 1974 and 1975. Significant differences were found between male and female applicants on criteria indicating research productivity. Some possible explanations are explored.It appears that the predicted tightening of the job market for psychologists (Little, 1972) has arrived. At the 1975 Eastern Psychological Assocition (EPA) convention there were 903 applicants for 242 positions. Employers surveyed at the 1974 EPA convention reported an average of 89.2 applicants for each position (Kessler, McKenna, Russell, Stang, & Sweet, Note 1). With the increased competition for positions comes the necessity to screen applicants more carefully. The personal experience of the authors is that offers of interviews are made to applicants who show the most research and teaching promise as indicated by examination of their vitas.In addition, the criteria indicating research promise are weighted more heavily than those indicating teaching promise. Little information exists, however, on what constitutes promising performance on these criteria.In this paper we report data from vitas submitted over the last two years for Assistant Professor level social psychology positions in our department. This normative information should be useful for applicants and their advisors in assessing their strengths and weaknesses and for employers as a guide for evaluation of vitas.The most disturbing exception to the assumption that interviews are offered to those showing the most research promise comes from research indicating that female applicants have more difficulty finding a position than male applicants (Austin, 1972;Kessler, _et _al., Note 1). A survey of job applicants at the 1974 EPA convention revealed that female applicants received fewer interview invitations and job offers than male applicants and that the jobs accepted by female applicants were at a lower rank than those accepted by male applicants (Kessler, et al., Note 1). If male and female applicants were equally qualified, this finding would suggest that a form of the patronage employment system described by Love (1972) is alive and well in psychology. If male applicants were better qualified than female applicants, the question arises immediately as to why this sex difference exists. In this paper we compare male and female applicants in order to explore these possibilities.Method. Extensive advertizing was done for both positions. The 1974 position only became available in mid-March. At this time, job description letters were sent to the chairmen of all departments granting PhDs in psychology. Because of the long lag between submission and the appear-1 Order of authorship was determined randomly for the first two authors, whose contributions were approximately equal. The same holds for the last three authors. Gary Barrett is now at Iowa State University.