Are Women Perceived as Worse Magicians Than Men? Gender Bias When Evaluating Magic Tricks

Gustav Kuhn,Cyril Thomas,Pascal Gygax,André Didierjean

doi:10.32872/spb.v14i3.33574

Abstract

We present two experiments investigating the effect of the perceived gender of a magician on the perception of the quality of magic tricks. In Experiment 1, tricks performed by an allegedly female magician were considered worse than those by an allegedly male magician. In Experiment 2, participants had to generate possible solutions to how the tricks were done. Under these conditions, male participants were better at explaining the tricks, but the gender effect found in Experiment 1 disappeared. We discuss the gender bias in Experiment 1 and the lack of bias in Experiment 2 in terms of specific social and cognitive mechanisms (e.g., cognitive dissonance).

Highlights

We present two experiments investigating the effect of the perceived gender of a magician on the perception of the quality of magic tricks
The reason for doing so was that changing the magician within each session remained unnoticed by participants, the quality of the magic tricks was not completely homogeneous, as shown by an overall slightly better – yet non-significant – evaluation of our male magician (male magician: M = 4.21, SD = 0.84; female magician: M = 3.96, SD = 1.03, t(13) = 1.28, p = .22, 95% CIdifference [-0.67, 0.17])
The final model, including only Perceived Gender of Magician as a fixed factor, showed that participants rated the tricks performed by NICOLAS more positively, M = 4.11, SD = 0.89, 95% CI [3.79, 4.43], than those performed by NATHALIE, M = 3.88, SD = 1.01, 95% CI [3.51, 4.24], t(161) = 2.15, p =

Summary

Introduction

We present two experiments investigating the effect of the perceived gender of a magician on the perception of the quality of magic tricks. In Experiment 2, participants had to generate possible solutions to how the tricks were done Under these conditions, male participants were better at explaining the tricks, but the gender effect found in Experiment 1 disappeared. Ally, these results illustrated how gender can act as a catalyst for biased representations of reality. This seminal paper strongly indicated prejudicial beliefs against women (and by women), some authors have questioned its actual relevance (e.g., Swim, Borgida, Maruyama, & Myers, 1989). Aside from its obvious statistical weakness (i.e., Goldberg on‐ ly presented descriptive statistics), Swim et al (1989), in their meta-analysis, argued that subsequent studies that addressed such a gender bias were characterized by weak effect sizes. When more infor‐ mation about the protagonist is provided, the bias diminishes

Results

Discussion

Conclusion