| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 心理學研究所 === 95 === Different from previous gender stereotype threat studies that use mathematics tests as tools, this study uses the manual task—paper cutting generally not familiar to males as experimental material and take them as stigmatized group numbers. This research take into consideration the group task (cooperation situation) to investigate whether participants’ additional efforts will compensate the degraded performance resulting from gender stereotype threat, in the situation that a stereotype can cause people to lower their effort as a result of their worry about their perceived poor performance (stereotype threat) and can also motivate them to make more effort thanks to their prediction of their partner’s poor performance (social compensation).
The participants were randomly assigned to one of the eight conditions in a factorial design: 2 (stereotype threat: salience, not salience) × 2（partner’s gender: male, female）× 2（partner’s performance: good, bad）. To evoke stereotype threat effect, the experimenters directly told the participants that “Females are better than males in the manual task.” To evoke social compensation effect, researchers arranged “males” and “poor performance” information. Valid samples were 121 male undergraduates, and their reaction time and quality of the manual task were measured.
Not as expected, the results do not support hypotheses. However, it has found out that “the interaction of partner’s gender and partner’s performance” was significant. That is, the participant whose partner’s information is consistent with stereotype performs better than the participant whose partner’s information was inconsistent with stereotype. The result suggests that partner’s information may have unexpected influence on participants’ performance. This article also discusses the results, explains the limitations and offers suggestions for future research.
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