Gendered Associations: How Congruity Shapes Expectations, Perceptions, and Decision-making in Interaction

Abstract

In this dissertation, I present a series of survey experiments that contribute to ourunderstanding of gender congruity and its impacts on perceptions and decision-making in interaction. In Chapter 2, I explore individuals’ perceptions of male and female actors’ gender congruent and incongruent interactions. I ask participants to rate the likelihood of a series of interactions, randomly assigning them to see a male or female actor in each. I also collect other participants’ ratings of the “genderedness” of these same interactions, or expectations for the gender of the individual involved. I find that gender congruity strongly shapes perceptions of women’s interactions: feminine interactions with female actors were rated as particularly likely while masculine interactions with female actors were rated as particularly unlikely. Men’s interactions, however, were rated neutrally, neither likely nor unlikely, regardless of whether they were perceived to be more masculine or feminine. This has implications for the way interaction partners and observers respond to men and women in interpersonal settings. Where reactions to men’s congruent and incongruent interactions seem to be somewhat indifferent, women may face stronger negative or positive responses to their behavior depending on whether it is gender congruent or not. In Chapter 3, I explore how gender shapes interaction in a particular context: jury deliberation. In particular, I investigate the impact of gender and gender congruent or incongruent emotion expression on jurors’ ability to have influence on fellow jurors. I ask participants to review trial evidence and engage in mock deliberation with pre-scripted jurors, experimentally manipulating the gender and emotion expression of one dissenting juror. I find that in deliberation, participants perceive a female juror to be less influential than a male juror, but are actually influenced equally regardless of juror gender. Further, female participants remained more confident in their original verdicts across deliberation while male participants were influenced more by the dissenter. Neither form of influence was affected by the juror’s emotion expression. I ivsuggest that because the trial depicted domestic violence, which is culturally associated with female victims, women may have had more influence and greater confidence in their verdicts in this situation than they typically would. I test for this possibility in Chapter 4 by manipulating whether participants see evidence for a murder trial involving intimate partner violence or not involving intimate partner violence (IPV). I find that women are more likely than men to vote guilty across all trial evidence, but are particularly likely to vote guilty for IPV trials. Men are especially likely to vote not guilty for IPV trials. Further, participants were more likely to vote guilty when they anticipated deliberating with a male juror. Juror influence was low overall and did not vary by gender or trial content. Together, these studies have implications for how the gender composition and task content of groups may impact decision-making.