Bias, accuracy and assumed similarity in judging intimate partners’ sexist attitudes

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Women and men are particularly vulnerable to the costs of sexism in intimate relationships, which may override relationship enhancement motives that produce positive biases. Inspired by error management principles, we propose that women and men should make biased judgments of intimate partners’ sexist attitudes to help avoid the harmful costs of sexism that occur within mixed-gender relationships. Women may overestimate partners’ hostile sexism because failing to detect men’s hostile sexism should render women especially vulnerable to the risk of maltreatment, whereas women may underestimate partners’ benevolent sexism because expecting special treatment that is unavailable is more costly than receiving unexpected benevolence. By contrast, men may overestimate partners’ benevolent sexism because failing to prevent women’s dissatisfaction and anger when men do not fulfill gallant gender roles would be most costly than providing more benevolence than expected. Comparing perceptions of partners’ attitudes to partners’ actual sexist attitudes in two studies of mixed-gender couples ( N = 91 and 84 dyads) confirmed this gender-differentiated pattern. On average, women overestimated their partners’ hostile sexism and underestimated their partners’ benevolent sexism, whereas men overestimated their partners’ benevolent sexism. Although we did not make predictions about judgments of women’s hostile sexism, analyses also revealed that men underestimated their partners’ hostile sexism. The pattern of bias has important implications for understanding the ways sexist attitudes affect intimate relationships and sustain gender inequality.