School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, King's College, Aberdeen, AB24 3FX, Scotland, UK.
Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Sci Rep. 2024 Aug 20;14(1):19320. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-67770-8.
Counterstereotypes challenge the deleterious effects that gender-typed beliefs exert on people's occupational aspirations and lifestyle choices. Surprisingly, however, the critical issue of how readily unexpected person-related knowledge can be acquired remains poorly understood. Accordingly, in two experiments in which the facial appearance of targets was varied to manipulate goodness-of-stereotype-fit (i.e., high vs. low femininity/masculinity), here we used a probabilistic selection task to probe the rate at which counter-stereotypic and stereotypic individuals can be learned. Whether occupational (Expt. 1) or trait-related (Expt. 2) gender stereotypes were explored, a computational analysis yielded consistent results. Underscoring the potency of surprising information (i.e., facial misfits), knowledge acquisition was accelerated for unexpected compared to expected persons, both in counter-stereotypic and stereotypic learning contexts. These findings affirm predictive accounts of social perception and speak to the optimal characteristics of interventions designed to reduce stereotyping outside the laboratory.
反刻板印象挑战了性别类型信念对人们职业抱负和生活方式选择产生的有害影响。然而，令人惊讶的是，关于人们如何容易地获得意想不到的与人相关的知识的关键问题仍未得到很好的理解。因此，在两个实验中，我们通过改变目标的面部外貌来操纵刻板印象相符的程度（即高女性化/男性化与低女性化/男性化），使用概率选择任务来探究反刻板印象和刻板印象个体的学习速度。无论是探索职业（实验 1）还是特质相关的（实验 2）性别刻板印象，计算分析都得出了一致的结果。突显了令人惊讶的信息（即面部不匹配）的强大作用，与预期的人相比，对于出乎意料的人，无论是在反刻板印象还是刻板印象的学习环境中，知识获取都得到了加速。这些发现证实了社会感知的预测性解释，并说明了旨在减少实验室外刻板印象的干预措施的最佳特征。
