Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Spontaneous Gender-Stereotypical Categorization Of Trait Labels And Job Labels, Jerzy Karylowski, Michael Motes, Harry Wallace, Heather Harckom, Eric Hewlett, Stacy Maclean, John Parretta, Cherin Vaswani

Harry M. Wallace

Do people spontaneously categorize stereotypically masculine and stereotypically feminine trait and job labels according to gender even when the task at hand has nothing to do with gender? The present experiment provided a methodologically stringent test of such spontaneous gender-stereotypical categorization using a modification of a semantic priming task. Participants made name/no name judgments for targets that included nonsensical letter strings as well as male and female first names. Half of the first names in each gender category were selected to indicate members of participants’ own generation (Younger Generation names) and the other half were selected to indicate members of …