How Gender-Role Salience Influences Attitude Strength and Persuasive Message Processing

Abstract

We conducted three studies to examine the relationship between gender and persuasion. We tested the notion that making gender roles salient affects the strength of individuals’ attitudes and the way they respond to persuasive information. In Studies 1 and 2, we found that priming women with the female gender role reduced the strength of their attitudes (Study 1, N = 50) and increased their susceptibility to persuasion through a low-thought process (Study 2, N = 98). In Study 3, we manipulated the salience of both the female and male gender roles among men and women and assessed persuasion to a counter-attitudinal message ( N = 185). We found that the female and male primes affected men and women similarly, with the female prime causing participants to process messages superficially and the male prime leading to thoughtful message processing. These findings help to explain women’s slightly greater persuadability in meta-analyses and provide evidence of harms that stereotypes about women can cause. Moving forward, we urge researchers to be wary of gender salience in the research context, especially when conducting persuasion research.