ABSTRACT
Some psychological assumptions appear so common and natural that they rarely become the target of theoretical reflection. Let us take as a starting point the common gender stereotype that women tend to be more emotional than men. Traditionally, to demonstrate that such a stereotype can bias social perception, participants would typically be exposed to carefully selected stimulus information to show no difference in the emotionality of men and women and, yet, judgments would reflect more emotionality attributed to female than male target persons. In journals and textbooks of social cognition, stereotype effects are commonly explained within the heuristics and biases framework, that is, in terms of restricted mental resources and processing motivation. In the given example, one might explain the belief that women are more emotional than men in terms of Kahneman and Tversky’s (1972) representativeness heuristic. Emotionality is more representative of females than of males. Alternatively, researchers may draw on the notion of illusory correlations based on the expectancy that femininity and emotionality belong together (Camerer, 1988; Chapman & Chapman, 1967; Hamilton & Rose, 1980) or based on the similarity of the two concepts (cf. Fiedler, 2000; Shweder, 1977, 1982). In still another role-theoretical framework (Eagly, 1987; Hoffman & Hurst, 1990), perceived gender differences in emotionality can be explained in terms of the social roles played by women and men.
