Stigma Consciousness in Intergroup Contexts

Extract

[...] Another participant (i.e. one of the participants in the study) should decide who the last beneficiary of this award would be. Next, the participants fill out a consent form and demographic information and are asked a few questions to observe their decision-making process. Three experimental conditions are then created: A control condition, a non-sexist condition, and a sexist condition, each with women with low and high levels of awareness of stigmatization. In the control condition, women receive information sheets about their male partner, without their AWS score. [...]

[...] Pinel specifically mentions the tragedy of Rosewood, in which an entire black community was massacred by a group of white men because a white woman claimed to have been sexually harassed by a black man. Conclusion The deleterious effect of awareness of stigmatization deeply and durably affects the relationships between different groups of belonging, which can lead us to question the impact of stereotypes, particularly those of gender if we observe the present study. Such results are fascinating, leading us to become aware and rethink the women/men relationships to better understand them and thus avoid destructive and systemic biases. [...]

[...] their outgroup. This categorization process is conducive to stereotypes: In fact, the larger the group, the more the category must be vague and impersonal in order to encompass the individuals who constitute it. Ingroup : The ingroup, according to Leyens et al. (1996), represents the group with which individuals identify through a common system of beliefs. This concept can be linked to the concept of social categorization: The more the ingroup is manifest (greater trust among its members, a strong sense of belonging within the group, etc.), the greater the distance with the outgroup, which makes the social categorization of the ingroup and outgroup almost caricatural, favoring the emergence of stereotypes. [...]

[...] If this first hypothesis is true, then women with high stigma consciousness should be particularly disturbed when they interact with a man they believe to be sexist and, consequently, they should be particularly likely to adopt an interpersonal attitude that could create more intergroup tensions than those that existed initially. Method Fifty-nine men and fifty-nine women are recruited to participate in this study. Their level of stigma consciousness is evaluated. The men complete Spence and Helmreich's (1972) and the Attitudes Toward Women Questionnaire (AWS) to ensure that their level of negative attitude towards women is moderate, to avoid generating bias in this study. [...]

[...] Then, the men and women from each pair choose the candidate for the journalism award. After this choice, they evaluate each other's arguments. Results Elizabeth C. Pinel performed linear regressions to observe causal relationships between each of her variables. Regarding women, she found that those who were very aware of stigmatization in the sexist condition indeed evaluated their partner's arguments more negatively than women in the other conditions. She also observed a trend of women who were less aware of stigmatization to evaluate their partner more negatively when they believed him to be sexist. [...]