How Gender-Role Salience Influences Attitude Strength and Persuasive Message Processing

Abstract

We conducted three studies to examine the relationship between gender and persuasion. We tested the notion that making gender roles salient affects the strength of individuals' attitudes and the way they respond to persuasive information. In Studies 1 and 2, we found that priming women with the female gender role reduced the strength of their attitudes (Study 1, N ¼ 50) and increased their susceptibility to persuasion through a low-thought process (Study 2, N ¼ 98). In Study 3, we manipulated the salience of both the female and male gender roles among men and women and assessed persuasion to a counter-attitudinal message (N ¼ 185). We found that the female and male primes affected men and women similarly, with the female prime causing participants to process messages superficially and the male prime leading to thoughtful message processing. These findings help to explain women's slightly greater persuadability in meta-analyses and provide evidence of harms that stereotypes about women can cause. Moving forward, we urge researchers to be wary of gender salience in the research context, especially when conducting persuasion research.

Understanding Environmental Attitude and Willingness to Pay With an Objective Measure of Attitude Strength

“…In addition, we found men (rather than females) tend to have stronger environmental attitudes, which is consistent with previous research on gender salience and persuadability. For instance, Eaton, Visser, and Burns (2017) showed that priming women with the female gender role reduced the strength of their attitudes and increased their susceptibility to persuasion through a low-thought process.…”

The effectiveness of knowledge mobilization on parent emotion beliefs is moderated by parent gender, dysregulation, and family expressiveness.

“…For instance, that mothers are more likely than fathers to react supportively to children’s negative emotions may be a function of mothers being more likely to believe their children’s negative emotion expression is acceptable as compared to fathers (Wong et al, 2008). In addition, the extant literature on persuasion and belief change indicates that men and women’s ability to be persuaded varies as a function of both information qualities, such as the style and framing of the message being presented, as well as the salience of gender roles held by the individual (Eaton et al, 2017). Thus, given the links between parent gender, gendered emotion beliefs, and socialization practices, as well as the differential predictors of belief modification for men and women, it is reasonable to suspect that the impact of a given KMb strategy that aims to modify such beliefs may differ based on parent gender.…”

Endorsing and Reinforcing Gender and Age Stereotypes: The Negative Effect on Self-Rated Leadership Potential for Women and Older Workers

“…Experimental data shows that women are less willing to contribute ideas to a group when the area of expertise is incongruent with traditional gender roles or communal traits, regardless of other group members' behavior (Coffman, 2014). The salience of traditional gender roles and traits for women has also been shown to weaken some women's attitudes and increase their susceptibility to persuasion (Eaton et al, 2017). Similarly, when age stereotypes that denote older people as incompetent are made salient, older people approach tasks requiring high competence differently, becoming more cautious in eyewitness memory tasks (Thomas et al, 2018) and less confident in their driving ability despite consistent objective performance (Chapman et al, 2014).…”