Gender Stereotyping Enhances Verbal Fluency Performance in Men (and Women)

Abstract

Numerous studies have demonstrated that fear of confirming negative stereotypes (stereotype threat) can hamper women’s performance in certain mathematical and spatial tasks in which men usually excel. By contrast, very little is known about how men are affected by stereotype threat in tasks in which women excel. We therefore asked 36 men and 39 women, recruited at the Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany, to complete two tests of verbal fluency (word fluency, four-word sentences). Prior to testing, participants were either told that gender differences in verbal abilities were going to be investigated or they received gender-neutral task instructions. We hypothesized that this would trigger the gender stereotype of women’s verbal superiority and, as a consequence, lead to a stereotype threat effect with decreased verbal fluency performance in men. However, men’s verbal fluency scores were higher under gender difference instructions than in the control condition. Since women showed a similar pattern and had generally higher scores, the gender difference remained stable across conditions. The findings may reflect (a) that gender stereotyping induced a competitive situation and, as a result, enhanced performance in all participants or (b) stereotype reactance in men, which would suggest that men and women react differently to gender stereotype activations in gender-sensitive cognitive abilities. Either way, the findings imply that cognitive performance changes significantly if participants are aware that cognitive gender differences are investigated, which is probably the case in many studies investigating gender differences.