Gender roles and implicit causality

2. Method Participants Our convenience sample consisted of 386 university students which were recruited at two universities in Germany and China: 195 students (117 female, age: 18-31, M = 22.17, SD = 2.09) were recruited on the campus of the University of Munich (Germany) and 191 students (111 female, age: 18-30, M = 22.05, SD = 2.13) were recruited at the University of Nanjing (China). Material Working together with three Chinese native speakers in Germany, the German version of the questionnaire was translated into Chinese and back-translated into German. The validity of the Chinese version was ensured by pretesting Chinese native speakers in Germany (N = 40). The questionnaire consisted of 24 scenarios each represented by a minimal sentence of the pattern “A [interpersonal verb] B”. Six Numerous studies investigated the phenomenon of implicit verb causality (cf. Rudolph & Försterling, 1997). This research revealed the robust finding that different types of interpersonal verbs lead to systematic causal attributions to one of the interacting persons. However, few studies addressed the interaction between verb causality and context variables. The present cross-cultural study investigates implicit gender roles in action and state verbs comparing two samples from Germany and China. Results show that the German sample perceived actions to be caused by men whereas states were causally attributed to women. However, our Chinese sample perceived men and women rather equally accountable.