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Journal Article 6.1: Eaton, A. A., Visser, P. S., & Burns, V. (2017). How gender-role salience influences attitude strength and persuasive message processing. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 41, 223–239.

URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684317696257

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.

Journal Article 6.2: Axt, J. R. (2017, October 4). The best way to measure explicit racial attitudes is to ask about them. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 1–11.

URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617728995

Abstract: Direct assessments of explicit racial attitudes, such as reporting an overt preference for White versus Black people, may raise social desirability concerns and reduce measurement quality. As a result, researchers have developed more indirect self-report measures of explicit racial attitudes. While such measures dampen social desirability concerns, they may weaken measurement quality by assessing construct-irrelevant attitudes, thereby lowering correspondence between measure and construct. To investigate whether direct or indirect self-report measures better assess explicit racial attitudes, participants (N > 800,000) completed an implicit racial attitude measure and a subset of over 400 items that varied in the degree to which they were indirect or direct assessments of self-reported racial attitudes. More direct assessments of racial preferences were better predictors of implicit racial attitudes and maximized differences between Black and White participants. These results suggest that the best method to measure individuals’ explicit racial attitudes is to ask about them directly.

Journal Article 6.3: Horwitz, S. R., & Dovidio, J. F. (2017). The rich—love them or hate them? Divergent implicit and explicit attitudes toward the wealthy. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 20, 3–31.

URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430215596075

Abstract: Adding to a growing body of work on the psychology of social class, the present research examined implicit and explicit attitudes toward rich people, standing out from much previous work that has focused on negative evaluations of people with low socioeconomic status (SES). Across three studies, we found that participants (who typically identified as middle class) implicitly, but not explicitly, favored the rich over the middle class. Although financial resources represent a continuum objectively, attitudes toward the rich seem to be conceptually distinct from evaluations of low-SES people. Additionally, we demonstrated that implicit prorich attitudes uniquely predict leniency on a rich driver who causes a car accident, while explicit attitudes do not predict such judgments. This work expands and clarifies knowledge of implicit wealth attitudes and suggests that implicit prorich attitudes are an important factor in understanding how social class influences daily life.