Auditory Stroop reveals implicit gender associations in adults and children

Henry the Nurse is a Doctor Too: Implicitly Examining Children’s Gender Stereotypes for Male and Female Occupational Roles

“…A sentence was classified as an associative strategy if the sentence did not interactively incorporate both nouns (e.g., "Fish and seaweed are in the ocean"). In line with the previous research (Banaji and Hardin 1996;Most et al 2007), Kee and Guttentag (1994) found that children (1) were significantly faster at creating a sentence, (2) used more elaborative strategies, and (3) remembered significantly more pairs then when they were presented with congruent noun pairs (e.g., "bush-garden") than incongruent noun pairs (e.g., "glass-elbow").…”

“…Participants made significantly faster judgments if the noun-name pair was congruent (e.g., engineer -Frank), rather than incongruent (e.g., engineer -Mary), with gender role stereotypes. Likewise, Most et al (2007) reported similar findings using an auditory Stroop task with both adults and children (i.e., 8-to 9-year-olds). In this study, participants heard both male and female voices saying stereotypically masculine or feminine names (e.g., "Amy") or words (e.g., "tough") and were required to rapidly respond as to whether the voice was that of a man or a woman.…”

“…Cann (1993) has long argued that one issue to consider when using these types of explicit measures is that they may lend themselves to more reactive and biased responding because children may be more consciously awareness of socially appropriate responses. Few studies have used more implicit measures when investigating children's gender role schemas (Bennett et al 2000;Kail and Levine 1976;Koblinsky et al 1978;Liben and Signorella 1980;Martin andHalverson 1981, 1983;Most et al 2007;Nadelman 1974). For instance, in a pioneering study, Koblinsky and colleagues (1978) tested children using an implicit memory task where participants first read a story about a boy and a girl who exhibited both stereotypic and counterstereotypic behaviors and traits.…”

“…The ability to rapidly encode, access and utilize stored information is often referred to as knowledge base access (Fischer et al 1994;Kee and Guttentag 1994). Knowledge base accessibility, as it relates to gender stereotypes, has been studied in adults (Banaji and Hardin 1996;Blair and Banaji 1996;Most et al 2007) and, to a much lesser extent, in children (Most et al 2007). Banaji and Hardin (1996) tested college students' knowledge base access using a stereotype-priming task that relied on the premise that when presented with two words consecutively, the processing of the second word will be influenced by how closely it relates to the first word (Macrae et al 2002;Martin 1993;Sherman et al 1997).…”

Economic Writing on the Pressing Problems of the Day: The Roles of Moral Intuition and Methodological Confusion

“…Most people in Euro-American cultures will, for example, think of dogs as somehow masculine and cats as somehow feminine (even though of course both species come in both sexes). Psychological research shows that cognitive gender schemas are important ways in which we "organize incoming information and integrate it-through no conscious act of will-into clusters" (Most, Sorber, & Cunningham, 2007) and that these gender associations pervade perceptions about academic fields (Whitehead, 1996). Very often this dualistic metaphorical structure is also hierarchical.…”