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Significant gendered performance differences are signals of systemic inequity in higher education. Understanding of these inequities has been hampered by the local nature of prior studies; consistent measures of performance disparity across many disciplines and institutions have not been available. Here, we report the first wide-ranging, multi-institution measures of gendered performance difference, examining more than a million student enrollments in hundreds of courses at five universities. After controlling for factors that relate to academic performance using optimal matching, we identify patterns of gendered performance difference that are consistent across these universities. Biology, chemistry, physics, accounting, and economics lecture courses regularly exhibit gendered performance differences that are statistically and materially significant, whereas lab courses in the same subjects do not. These results reinforce the importance of broad investigation of performance disparities across higher education. They also help focus equity research on the structure and evaluative schemes of these lecture courses.

This research investigated the contextual nature of decisions about racial exclusion by analyzing why individuals might be willing to accept members of other racial groups into some types of social relationships but nevertheless exclude them from other types of relationships. Our analysis examined the underlying reasoning processes used to make such decisions. We conducted two studies to test the types of reasoning used by young adults regarding cross-race interpersonal relationships. Study 1 (N=292) demonstrated that racial exclusion is more likely to be condoned and justified as an issue of personal choice and less likely to be seen as an issue of overt racism in intimate than in nonintimate contexts. Study 2 (N=196) demonstrated that participants viewed it as more wrong to exclude others from cross-race than same-race relationships and that when relationships were high (vs. low) in physical contact they were viewed as more likely to be issues of personal choice, regardless of whether they were same- or cross-race. The results help explain why there are substantial contextual differences in the extent to which exclusion of individuals based on racial group membership is perceived as acceptable.

Investigated how 50 preschoolers evaluated the appropriateness of excluding boys and girls from two types of activities and two types of future roles across different exclusion contexts. Found that straightforward gender-based exclusion was judged wrong. Decisions were justified on the basis of moral reasons. However, children used both moral and social conventional reasoning to evaluate multifaceted situations. (Author/KB)

We compared the subtlety of four measures of sexism and sources of variation in male and female psychology students' judgments that beliefs from these scales and everyday behaviors were sexist. Participants judged traditional gender role and hostile sexist beliefs as more sexist than benevolent and modern sexist beliefs, indicating the latter were more subtle measures of sexism. Participants also judged traditional gender role behaviors as more sexist than unwanted sexual attention, suggesting the latter may less readily be identified as sexist. Variation in judgments of beliefs as sexist was related to differences in likelihood of endorsing such beliefs. This relation fully accounted for the tendency for men to be less likely to judge beliefs as sexist in comparison to women. Endorsement of Modern and Hostile Sexist beliefs was related to judgments of behaviors as sexist. The implications of the results for scale usage and identifying sexist behavior are discussed.

Two experiments examined how the goals of self-presentation and maintenance of control over one's outcomes influence women's tendencies to make or to avoid making attributions to discrimination. Demonstrating the importance of self-presentational goals, Experiment 1 showed the targets of discrimination were just as likely as similar others to make attributions to discrimination under private reporting conditions, but they were significantly less likely to do so under public reporting conditions. This experiment also provided initial evidence that need for personal control increases discrimination attributions. Experiment 2 demonstrated that targets' minimization of discrimination, observed in public reporting conditions, was eliminated when the need to reassert personal control was induced. Both experiments also demonstrated that failing to view events as discrimination has negative psychological costs.

Four experiments examined how an actor's intent and the harm experienced by a target influence judgments of prejudice and discrimination. The presence of intent increased the likelihood that participants judged an actor as prejudiced and the actor's behavior as discriminatory. When intent was uncertain, harm influenced judgments of the behavior, which in turn influenced judgments of the actor, and participants were more cautious in their judgments about an actor than an actor's behavior. Harm also played a stronger role in targets' than observers' judgments. Understanding the role of intent and harm on perceptions of prejudice can help explain variations in targets' versus observers', and possibly targets' versus actors', judgments of discrimination and prejudice.

The authors tested the hypothesis that members of stigmatized groups would be unwilling to report that negative events that occur to them are the result of discrimination when they are in the presence of members of a nonstigmatized group. Supporting this hypothesis, women and African Americans were more likely to report that a failing grade assigned by a man or a European American was caused by discrimination, rather than by their own lack of ability, when they made the judgment privately and in the presence of a fellow stigmatized group member. However, they were more likely to indicate that the cause of the failure was lack of ability, rather than discrimination, when they expected to make these judgments aloud in the presence of a nonstigmatized group member.

According to the theory of stereotype threat (C. M. Steele, 1997; C. M. Steele & J. Aronson, 1995), activating stereotypes about a group's typical underperformance on a task can undermine a group member's performance on that task. The goal of the present research was to more fully delineate the contexts that activate task-performance stereotypes and the mechanisms that might lead to, or potentially prevent, such performance decrements. In 2 experiments, individuals led to believe that they had high ability on a task predicted that they would do better on future performances of the same or similar tasks than did those given ambiguous feedback about their task abilities when stereotypes were not accessible. However, activating group stereotypes - for instance, by creating expected solo status - undermined these positive expectations.

L. Wallach and M. A. Wallach (1994) argued that many hypotheses tested by social psychologists are either 'near-tautologies' or derivable from 'near-tautologies' and thus are of little interest. The authors of this article applaud their concern but find that their conclusions are based on flawed analyses and arguments. Their conceptualization of 'near-tautology' is problematic. Their analysis is based on a misconceived notion of falsifiability and is inattentive to the social context within which scientific knowledge is accumulated. These problems undermine their efforts to offer a careful analysis of social psychological hypotheses. Most alarmingly, their flawed arguments imply a dangerously narrow prescription as to 'what kinds of social psychology experiments are of value to perform.'

Stereotype activation facilitates the information-processing ability of perceivers for stereotypical characteristics. The activation enables easier subject recognition of degenerated stereotypic traits, location of the traits in a complex stimulus array and effective memory representation. Subjects who exhibit stereotype activation show more effective processing of the traits.

Two experiments, conducted on 90 and 145 students, respectively, revealed the influence of priming a social category label or traits specific to the category on the classification of individuals. Social judgment depended on the situation, and different types of priming may yield varied judgments. The results of these experiments are consistent with previous research on the subject.

Three experiments tested the hypotheses that while forming stereotypes of social groups, people abstract the central tendency and variability of different attribute dimensions to determine which ones best differentiate the groups and that more differentiating dimensions are more likely to become stereotypical in the sense of becoming strongly associated with the groups in memory. Supporting these hypotheses, Experiment 1 found that, after viewing behaviors performed by members of 2 groups, Ss characterized the groups more in terms of attribute dimensions indicating larger differences between the central tendencies of the groups, and Experiment 2 showed that this effect did not occur when Ss formed impressions of only 1 group. Experiment 3 found that Ss also characterized groups more in terms of attribute dimensions indicating lower within-group variability.

Five experiments used a name-matching paradigm developed by Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff, and Ruderman (1978) to investigate how people use the immediately apparent features of others as a basis of social categorization. Ss were more likely to categorize targets according to their sex than their race but also tended to categorize using a single subordinate category that represented sex and race simultaneously. Racially prejudiced subjects categorized to a greater degree by race than did non-prejudiced subjects, but manipulations of construct accessibility and processing goals did not influence categorization by race or sex. Processing goals did influence the use of clothing style a as a categorization feature. Results are discussed in terms of the functional utility of person features as a basis of categorization and the effects of categorization on social stereotyping and prejudice.

A meta-analysis of 54 experiments investigated the influence of social expectations on memory for information that is congruent and incongruent with those expectations. Results showed that overall, memory was better for expectancy-incongruent than expetancy-congruent information on recall and recognition sensitivity measures. Recognition measures that were uncorrected for response biases produced an overall tendency to report expectancy-congruent information as having been seen. A number of moderator variables influenced the strength of these overall effects, including the strength of the expectancy used to guide information processing, the complexity or cognitive demands of the processing task, set size, the type of expectancy, the type of target, Ss' information-processing goals, and the delay between exposure to the stimulus information and the memory test. The overall pattern of results appears to be most parsimoniously explained in terms of the influence of contextual variables on the perceiver's motivation to resolve incongruity.

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that memory for trait information describing social groups would be more congruent with prevailing expectations about those groups when group impressions are formed under conditions in which the perceiver is required to engage in multiple concurrent tasks. In Experiment 1, subjects read behaviors describing members of one, two, or four social groups with instructions to form impressions of all of the groups. The recall advantage for expectancy-incongruent over expectancy-congruent behaviors decreased as the number of groups increased. The number of behaviors describing each group did not affect the type of behaviors recalled. In Experiment 2, all subjects formed impressions of two social groups, but one-half of the subjects were required to simultaneously listen and attend to a distracting news broadcast. Nondistracted subjects recalled a greater proportion of incongruent than congruent behaviors, whereas distracted subjects recalled a greater proportion of congruent than incongruent behaviors. Results are discussed in terms of the conditions under which group stereotypes may be formed and maintained through preferential memory for expectancy-congruent information.

Examines research which suggests that children's developing knowledge about traditional gender roles has a substantial influence on how children process information pertaining to gender. Evidence also shows that as children attain gender constancy, their behaviors become especially responsive to gender-related information. (Author/RWB)

The present research investigated social and biological intergroup hierarchy beliefs in the US and South Korea, representative Northern European-heritage and East Asian cultures, respectively. We hypothesized that individual-orientation (the emphasis on individuals and individual achievements) and group-orientation (the emphasis on groups and efficient functioning of groups) would predict social and biological hierarchy beliefs differently within and between these cultures. As expected, intergroup hierarchy beliefs were stronger in South Korea than in the US, particularly for biological hierarchy beliefs. Multigroup structural equation modeling analyses revealed that group-orientation predicted intergroup hierarchy beliefs across cultures, but more strongly in South Korea than in the US. Also, an emphasis on individual achievements predicted social hierarchy beliefs only in the US, whereas an emphasis on roles/positions within groups predicted social and biological hierarchy beliefs only in South Korea. Results implied that intergroup hierarchy beliefs may be generally associated with group-orientation and the value of competence or efficiency in each culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two experiments, the authors found that providing feedback to European American participants that others held different beliefs about African Americans than they originally estimated significantly changed the beliefs that they held about that group. The observed changes were stronger for people who were exposed to information about the opinions of ingroup rather than outgroup members and persisted when measured in an unrelated experimental session held 1 week later. The authors also found in a third experiment that providing information that others agreed with the individual's own racial stereotypes bolstered them such that they were more resistant to subsequent change attempts. Taken together, the results suggest that learning about the racial beliefs of others has the potential to either produce or inhibit stereotype change.

One factor that may have contributed to seemingly conflicting conclusions regarding whether expectancy-congruent or expectancy-incongruent information is better remembered is the failure to take into consideration the amount of knowledge available to the perceiver as stimulus information is processed. This paper suggests that perceivers with well-developed expectations may recall more extremely expectancy-congruent information, in comparison to perceivers who have less well-established expectancies. Subjects saw behavioral descriptions of members of two college fraternities, one of which engaged in a majority of extraverted, and the other a majority of introverted, behaviors. One-half of the subjects first saw an 'experience' presentation containing 30 behaviors. Then all subjects saw a 'target' presentation containing 60 behaviors and later participated in a recall task. Each subject was assigned a score that represented the extremity of their recalled behaviors for each fraternity on the introversion-extraversion dimension. 'Experienced' subjects formed more extreme expectancy-congruent impressions of the fraternity members, and recalled information that was more congruent with these impressions, in comparison to 'inexperienced' subjects. Subjects who processed the behaviors under impression formation (versus memory) processing goals also recalled more extremely expectancy-congruent information. Results are discussed in terms of implications for stereotype formation and stereotype maintenance, and the influence of developmental changes on responsiveness to social information.