Motivated Stereotyping of Women: She’s Fine if She Praised Me but Incompetent if She Criticized Me

Abstract

Motivation may provoke stereotype use. In a field study of students’ evaluations of university instructors and in a controlled experiment, participants viewed women as less competent than men after receiving negative evaluations from them but not after receiving positive evaluations. As a result, the evaluation of women depended more on the favorability of the feedback they provided than was the case for men. Most likely, this occurred because the motivation of criticized participants to salvage their self-views by disparaging their evaluator led them to use a stereotype that they would otherwise not have used. The stereotype was not used by participants praised by a woman or by participants who observed someone else receive praise or criticism from a woman; all these participants rated the woman just as highly as participants rated a man delivering comparable feedback.