Personal and Social Identity Mindsets and Judgment of Gender Transgressors across Four Countries: Canada, India, Norway & Poland.

The social sanctions from others such as backlash for transgressing traditional gender stereotypes constitute one of the potential reasons why women and men are not willing to be involved in gender incongruent domains. In Study 1, 634 Polish students (including 325 women) rated male and female employees in gender congruent and gender incongruent positions of assistant or of chief engineer with regard to their agency and communality levels. The participants were randomly assigned to one out of three conditions: intergroup comparison (social identity prime), intragroup comparison (personal identity prime), and control group. Our results showed priming personal identity (triggering the feeling of one’s uniqueness) might have a positive effect on judgements of individuals in gender atypical roles, whereas the social identity prime (triggering the feeling of affiliation with the group) facilitates penalization of stereotype-disconforming behaviors.

In Study 2, we analyzed whether these effects are culture-dependent. That is, we examined if being primed with personal identity and social identity can lead to different results in different cultural contexts. Canadian (N=433), Norwegian (N=178), Polish (N=400), and Indian (N=366), students were asked to make judgments of characters in gender congruent or gender incongruent roles. The obtained results in four countries show that existing cross-cultural differences in perception of gender transgressors depend on salient cultural cues and can be regulated by activating certain cultural mindsets.