Effects of Gendered Language on Gender Stereotyping in Computer-Mediated Communication: The Moderating Role of Depersonalization and Gender-Role Orientation

This experiment examined what situational and dispositional features moderate the effects of linguistic gender cues on gender stereotyping in anonymous, text-based computer-mediated communication. Participants played a trivia game with an ostensible partner via computer, whose comments represented either prototypically masculine or feminine language styles. Consistent with the social identity model of deindividuation effects, those who did not exchange brief personal profiles with their partner (i.e., depersonalization) were more likely to infer their partner’s gender from the language cues than those who did. Depersonalization, however, facilitated stereotype-consistent conformity behaviors only among gender-typed individuals; that is, participants conformed more to their masculinethan feminine-comment partners, and men were less conforming than were women, only when they were both gender-typed and depersonalized.