Gender and Social Influence A Social Psychological Analysis

Men and women are believed to differ in how influential and easily influenced they are: Men are thought to be more influential, and women more easily influenced. In natural settings, men and women tend to differ in these ways, but these differences stem largely from formal status inequalities by which men are more likely than women to have high-status roles. Status is important because of the legitimate authority vested in high-status roles: Within appropriate limits, people of higher status are believed to have the right to make demands of those of lower status, and people of lower status are expected to comply with these demands. Yet, small, stereotypic sex differences in leadership and social influence generally have been found in laboratory experiments and other small-group settings where men and women have equal formal status. These small sex differences may occur because experience with hierarchical social structures in which men have higher status creates expectancies about male and female behavior, and these expectancies affect social interaction in ways that foster behavior that confirms the expectancies. Sex differences that occur in the laboratory as well as natural settings, then, may stem from social structural factors—namely, from the existing distributions of women and men into social roles. The impact of gender on social influence has been only incompletely understood by social scientists, although the study of social influence is one of the classic fields of social psychological inquiry. It will be argued in this article that a relation between gender and social influence has been documented in the research literature on sex differences as well as in the literature on stereotypes about male and female behavior. Studies of both types have pointed to greater influence by men and greater influenceability of women, although in laboratory experiments these sex differences in behavior typically are very small. According to the present analysis, the higher status that men ordinarily have in organizations and groups in natural settings is the major cause of these sex differences in influence behavior, even when manifested in laboratory settings. To identify a starting point for this analysis, it is helpful to think about social influence as it occurs in daily life. Much of the impact that we have on other people's behavior occurs because they comply with our expectations about how they should behave—a type of influence labeled normative social influence by Deutsch and Gerard (1955). Because so many of the expectations that people convey about one another's behavior stem from social roles, analysis of the impact of gender should focus primarily on normative social influence that arises in role-regulated contexts. Each of the role relationships of everyday life, such as husband and wife, professor and student, and employer and employee, defines a set of expectations that people hold about each other's behavior. To understand how gender is implicated in such role relationships, it is important to take into account their hierarchical nature. Individuals who are linked by a set of mutual role obligations are very often unequal in power, when power is understood as the capacity to influence the other person in the relationship. Although both persons may exert influence, it is seldom difficult to identify the position of greater power. The social norms associated with hierarchical roles ordinarily confer legitimacy on these inequalities of power and status. When legitimacy is established, the individual higher in the hierarchy is believed to have the right to exert influence by virtue of his or her position in the social system, and the individual lower in. the hierarchy is believed to have the obligation to comply with the demands that are made (Milgram, 1974). When superiors in a hierarchy possess legitimate authority in relation to subordinates, normative influence is usually very effective. The extent to which persons who have such authority obtain ready compliance with their requests has been demonstrated by social psychologists in several contexts (e.g., Milgram, 1965, 1974; Orne & Evans, 1965). Although political theorists inform us that limits are imposed on legitimate authority by the very norms that establish it and that it must be exercised within its denned limits to be perceived as rightful (Sternberger, 1968), social psychological research has September 1983 • American Psychologist Copyright 1983 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 971 shown that subordinates agree to a very wide range of requests made by persons possessing legitimate authority. This analysis of social influence in terms of hierarchy and legitimate authority has implications for gender issues primarily because men and women are differently distributed into social roles. Within most groups and organizations, the positions held by men tend to be higher in hierarchies of status and authority than the positions held by women.' In work settings, the rule that men have higher status positions is most strictly maintained in contexts where men and women work together and it is necessary for one person to supervise or otherwise control the work of the other. The power differential that forms between the sexes may be clearest when sex-segregated occupational groups exist in this context (England, 1979). When frequent on-the-job interaction is required between persons in a maledominated and a female-dominated occupation, the male-dominated occupation (e.g., physician) has greater power and status than the female-dominated occupation (e.g., nurse). As far as supervisory and administrative roles in organizations are concerned, there is abundant evidence that women become progressively scarcer at higher levels (L. K. Brown, 1979; Kanter, 1977; Mennerick, 1975). In settings other than the workplace, power is also not equally shared between men and women. In the family, husbands generally have the overall power advantage for both routine decision making and conflict resolution, even though there are some areas of decision making in which wives have primary authority (Blood & Wolfe, 1960; Gillespie, 1971; Scanzoni, 1972). Also, in task-oriented groups of various types, men generally have higher status than women (Meeker & Weitzel-O'Neill, 1977) and This article is based on a presidential address presented to Division 8 (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Los Angeles, August 1981. Research summarized in this article was supported by National Science Foundation Grants BNS77-11671, BNS7924471, and BNS80-23311. The author thanks Robert Eagly, Anne Fitzpatrick, Marlaine E. Lockheed, Michael Pallak, Cecelia Ridgeway, and Wendy Wood for their comments on a draft of the article. Requests for reprints should be sent to Alice H. Eagly, Department of Psychological Sciences, Peirce Hall, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907. 1 There is little evidence of major change in this aspect of American institutions. Aggregate data, such as those on sex differentials in income (Blumberg, 1979) and on sex differences in the time that employed persons spend on housework and child care (Hartmann, 1981), suggest that men's overall advantage in power and status is intact. Yet, dramatic increases in the number of women participating in the labor force and obtaining training in male-dominated, prestigious fields such as law and medicine suggest that the status difference between men and women may lessen in the future. are more likely to be perceived as leaders (Lockheed, in press) and to hold leadership positions (e.g., Megargee, 1969; Strodtbeck, James, & Hawkins, 1957). Because of these pervasive sex differences in the distribution of people into social roles that are hierarchically arranged, there should be relatively large sex differences in influence and influenceability when men's and women's statuses are not equated or controlled. Given the legitimate authority inherent in higher status positions, men would be expected to have greater power to influence others and to resist being influenced merely as a product of their greater concentration in higher status positions. Although most psychologists probably would not consider a sex difference accounted for by the covariation of sex with hierarchical status to be a true sex (or gender) difference, in daily life people must continually deal with differences between women and men that in fact occur in this form. Therefore, the differing distributions of men and women into hierarchically arranged roles must underlie any understanding of how gender affects social influence. Formal Status Inequalities and Implicit Theories of Influence The term formal status inequality is convenient for referring to the type of inequality that I have described. Such inequality is a product of a hierarchy of roles that is legitimized by social norms and embedded in the formal structure of groups and organizations. Empirical support for the idea that formal status inequalities between men and women account for most of the differences that occur in their influence and influenceability in natural settings might be obtained in a number of ways. One appropriate method is to determine perceivers' implicit theory of the influence that occurs in the groups and organizations with which they are familiar. Certainly people's beliefs cannot be expected to be completely accurate representations of the social environment (Jones, 1982; Ross, 1977). Yet the idea that hierarchy is the source of social influence sex differences would be supported by the clear recognition of this fact in perceivers' implicit theories of influence. The key hypothesis is that perceivers believe in the stereotypic sex differences that men are dominant and influential and women are submissive and easily influenced to the extent they believe that the men and women they observe are related through hierarchical roles that give men higher status. Although generalized belief in sex differences in attributes such as dominance and influence has been documented repeatedly (e.g., Broverman, Vogel, Broverman, Clarkson, & Rosenkrantz, 1972; Spence, Helmreich, & Stapp, 1974), the origin of these beliefs in the distribution of women and men into roles of differing status had not been demon972 September 1983 • American Psychologist Table 1 Mean Perceived Likelihood of Recipient's Behavioral Compliance Comparison scenarios (including job titles) Low-status communicator High-status communicator