Gender differences in implicit and explicit personality traits

This article investigates gender differences in implicit and explicit measures of the Big Five traits of personality. In a high-powered study (N = 14,348), we replicated previous research showing that women report higher levels of Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Neuroticism. For implicit measures, gender differences were much smaller for all, and opposite in sign for Extraversion. Somewhat higher levels of implicit Neuroticism and Agreeableness were observed in women, and somewhat higher levels of implicit Extraversion and Openness were observed in men. There was no gender difference in implicit Conscientiousness. A possible explanation is that explicit self-concepts partly reflect social norms and self-expectations about gender roles, while implicit self-concepts may mostly reflect self-related experiences. Describing gender differences in personality is a cultural obsession. Books like ''Men are from Mars, women are from Venus'' (Gray, 1992) feed the popular imagination that men and women are distinct species. The research literature is somewhat less dramatic. The scientific debate on gender differences in personality traits ranges from claiming that gender differences are close to zero (Hyde, 2005) to the view that they have been obscured by methodological limitations and are actually very large (Del Giudice, Booth, & Irwing, 2012), and a variety of positions in between (Lippa, 2006). This article compares gender differences in personality traits measured with self-report (explicit measurement), which are well-studied, with gender differences in implicit personality traits, as measured by the Implicit Association Test This provides an opportunity to identify possible contributing differences to gender differences as implicit self-concepts are presumed to mostly reflect accumulated experience (Nosek & Hansen, 2008; Nosek et al., 2011), whereas explicit self-concepts are thought to be influenced by experience and other factors such as deliberate self-perceptions, social desirability concerns , and societal norms (cf. 1.1. Gender differences in self-reported measures of personality traits Explicit personality assessments consistently document that women report higher levels of extraversion, neuroticism, agree-ableness and conscientiousness on the Big Five personality dimen-In western countries, gender differences are moderate for neuroti-cism (d % .40) and small for extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness (d % .20). There are three main theoretical accounts that might explain these differences. The evolutionary account (Baron-Cohen, 2003; Buss, 1995) ascribes gender differences in personality traits to innate sex dispositional differences. In this model, sex differences stem from the different adaptive challenges that men and women faced throughout hominid history. For example, women are more agreeable and nurturing because in previous …