The (Continuous) Nature of Perceived Gender Counter-Stereotype: A Threshold Model of Gender Stereotype Maintenance
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ORIGINAL PAPER
The (Continuous) Nature of Perceived Gender Counter‑Stereotype: A Threshold Model of Gender Stereotype Maintenance Fangfang Wen1 · Bin Zuo1 · Yang Wang1 · Yang Wu2 · Zeming Fang3 · Shuhan Ma1 Received: 22 September 2018 / Revised: 2 June 2020 / Accepted: 5 June 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract People often expect men and women to look, act, and think like typical members of their gender groups. When men and women deviate from gender-stereotypical expectations across various domains, people tend to denigrate them, compared to those who follow stereotypical expectations. This derogatory attitude—termed the backlash effect—has been well supported by psychological research. However, previous studies on the backlash effect have often neglected the fact that men and women can be counter-stereotypical of their gender groups, to varying degrees. This research tried to address this continuous nature of counter-stereotypical characteristics in various domains using six experiments to evaluate individual responses to gendered facial cues, behaviors, and psychological traits. We conducted three studies, with two experiments per study. Most importantly, this research proposed a threshold model of gender stereotype maintenance to explain people’s evaluations of gender-counterstereotypical targets across various domains. The threshold model suggested that appraisal for a target with balanced genderstereotypical and gender-counter-stereotypical characteristics tends to be more positive than for a target who strictly adheres to gender stereotypes or gender-counter-stereotypical characteristics. The results of all three studies supported the threshold model, which demonstrated a curvilinear pattern of participants’ appraisals and targets’ gender-counter-stereotypical degrees. The threshold model of stereotype maintenance has enriched the traditional stereotype maintenance theory and enlightened the development of a more effective impression management strategy. Moreover, it provided more ecological validity that treated gender counter-stereotype as a continuum rather than a binary variable. Keywords Gender perception · Gender role · Gender identity · Counter-stereotypes · Backlash effects
Introduction When men and women are not gender-stereotypical—for example, when women are too assertive and agentic (Heilman & Okimoto, 2007) or men are too modest and self-effacing (Moss-Racusin, Phelan, & Rudman, 2010)—perceivers have been shown to dislike them much more than they may have otherwise (for reviews, see Eagly & Karau, 2002; Rudman & Phelan, 2008). Based on the motivation to maintain one’s * Bin Zuo [email protected] 1
School of Psychology, Center for Studies of Social Psychology, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China
2
Academy of Marxism, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
3
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA
cognitive mindset (i.e., stereotype), this is often referred to as t
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