Imagine a princess asleep in a castle, waiting for her prince to slay the dragon and rescue her. Tales like the famous Sleeping Beauty clearly divide up gender roles. But what about more modern stories, borne of a generation increasingly aware of social constructs like sexism and racism? Do these stories tend to reinforce gender stereotypes, or counter them? In this paper, we present a techniqu...

Three experiments investigate how stereotypes form as justifications for prejudice. The authors created novel content-free prejudices toward unfamiliar social groups using either subliminal (Experiment 1, N = 79) or supraliminal (Experiment 2, N = 105; Experiment 3, N = 130) affective conditioning and measured the consequent endorsement of stereotypes about the groups. Following the stereotype ...

Male advantage on spatial tasks may be explained in part by gender stereotypes (Nash 1975). The current study investigated the effect of awareness of sex differences in mental rotation on mental rotation (MR) performance. We hypothesized that students with negative stereotypes would score significantly lower than students who were unaware or held positive stereotypes. Participants – 285 undergr...

It's possible to assume that women who study STEM topics with a low proportion of females have successfully overcome barriers in school and the family, making them less prone to stereotypic views, and influences. The present study focuses on these kinds of factors and analyzes to which degree family factors, school-related factors, and individual stereotypes may influence a woman's academic sel...

Competence, morality and sociability dimensions have shown to be essential to measure stereotypes. Theoretically, the attributes associated with the negative pole of morality are more reliable and have shown to have higher evaluative weight. However, the current research usually employs only positive attributes to measure each dimension. Since the advantages of the inclusion of negative moralit...

Three experiments indicate that affective cues regulate expression of implicitly measured stereotypes and attitudes. In Experiment 1, negative mood led to less stereotypic bias on the weapon-identification task [Payne, B. K. (2001). Prejudice and perception: The role of automatic and controlled processes in misperceiving a weapon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 181–192] than ...

I was 7 years old when I can first remember my ‘‘Bubbie’’ getting ready for bed during an overnight visit. With some curiosity, I watched her put her teeth into a glass of water and noticed the sagging flesh on her upper arms as she donned her nightgown, and I knew, without being told, that these physical peculiarities were associated with age. At that moment, I resolved to take good care of my...