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Five studies investigated gender differences in the accurate recall of the appearance of others. The greater interpersonal orientation and interpersonal sensitivity of women were predicted to give women an advantage over men in appearance accuracy. Under both directed- and incidental-learning conditions, women more accurately recalled information concerning the appearance of their social targets than did men, participants' memory for the appearance of female targets was more accurate than it was for male targets, and neither gender was found to be a relative advantage in recalling the appearance of same-gender targets. The motivational and knowledge-based factors that might underlie a gender difference in appearance accuracy are discussed.

Accuracy of participants' ratings of gender differences on 77 behaviors and traits was assessed by correlating participants' ratings with actual gender differences based on meta-analyses. Accuracy at the group level was impressively high in 5 samples of participants. Accuracy of individuals showed wide variability, suggesting that ability to accurately describe gender differences is an individual difference. Analysis of correlations between individual accuracy and a battery of psychological measures indicated that accuracy was negatively related to a tendency to accept and use stereotypes, negatively related to a rigid cognitive style, and positively related to measures of interpersonal sensitivity.People hold elaborate theories about how people behave, and they have many beliefs about social groups. Any belief about a social group can be considered a stereotype according to currently accepted definitions that do not distinguish between the general truth and falsehood of the belief (Judd & Park, 1993). Understanding how much truth might be contained in a given stereotype is an important and relatively recent undertaking in psychology (e.g.,

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