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Levels of Implicit Knowledge and Explicit Beliefs

Sarah Ogilvie

In order to determine the range in implicit knowledge of, and explicit beliefs about the female stereotype, means and standard deviations for all measures were calculated. These are displayed in Table 6.

Table 6.

Means and Standard Deviations for Measures of Both Implicit Knowledge and Explicit Beliefs About Gender Stereotypes. (N=40)

Measures of Stereotyping M SD
OthsVwsM 4.76 0.45
OthsVwsF 3.40 0.49
SentComp 0.66 0.74
WrdTask
Consistent pairs -42.36* 245.76
Inconsistent pairs -292.31* 330.56
Correct response rate 0.62 9.83E-02
YrVwsM 4.28 0.36
YrVwsF 2.72 0.43
ASI 2.40 0.65
WSQ(subset) 1.44 0.93

* these were negative values as they were standardised to control for overall response rate with responses to neutral traits (see previous subsection analysis of response latencies). OthsVwsM, OthsVwsF = male and female subscales of the OthsVws, YrVwsM, YrVwsF = male and female subscales of the YrVws.

In this table (Table 6) it is evident that there is not a large amount of variability in the OthsVws and the YrVws scores. It is further apparent that means for the female subscales of both the OthsVws and the YrVws traits were lower than those in the male subscales. One possible reason for these differences concerns the relationship between the characteristics in the subscales and the gender stereotypes. In this, it may be that the female subscale items were not as evocative of the related stereotype as the male items. It also may have been the case that the female items were more negatively valenced (e.g., excitable in a crisis) than those in the male subscale (e.g., acts as a leader), and as such, participants were less willing to associate them with women. Moreover, as similar means were obtained for the male subscale in both of these checklists, it indicates that the participant's explicit beliefs about the stereotypically male characteristics reflected what they believed others' beliefs about men to be. The averages obtained in two of the other explicit beliefs measures, suggests that participants' views towards women were more egalitarian than sexist. In these measures it was also apparent that there was not a large variance in responses. It is also apparent in Table 6 that as the mean obtained for the SentComp was greater than zero, participants tended to explain incongruent behaviours more than congruent behaviours. According to von Hippel (1997), this result indicates that the participants possessed implicit attributional bias; a form of implicit stereotypic knowledge.

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