Beliefs About Gender Differences in Language Bias Judgments of Male-Female Conversation
Project Type
Event
Abstract
Participants listened to a conversation between a man and a woman in which the two speakers spoke the same number of words and the same length of time. The speech content was counterbalanced across gender. Participants were asked to judge the percentage of time the male and the female speaker spoke during the conversation. Prior to the conversation, participants' own beliefs regarding the general talkativeness of women compared to men were assessed. Using a multilevel model predicting judgments of the percentage of time each speaker talked from speaker gender, participant gender, beliefs about general talkativeness of men and women, and all interactions revealed that the more participants believed women talk more than men, the more they thought the woman in the conversation they listened to had talked. This research suggests that our interpretation of language can be biased by our prior beliefs, and further hints that the belief that women talk more than men may be reinforced by the biased interpretation of the conversations we hear.
Beliefs About Gender Differences in Language Bias Judgments of Male-Female Conversation
Reed 330
Participants listened to a conversation between a man and a woman in which the two speakers spoke the same number of words and the same length of time. The speech content was counterbalanced across gender. Participants were asked to judge the percentage of time the male and the female speaker spoke during the conversation. Prior to the conversation, participants' own beliefs regarding the general talkativeness of women compared to men were assessed. Using a multilevel model predicting judgments of the percentage of time each speaker talked from speaker gender, participant gender, beliefs about general talkativeness of men and women, and all interactions revealed that the more participants believed women talk more than men, the more they thought the woman in the conversation they listened to had talked. This research suggests that our interpretation of language can be biased by our prior beliefs, and further hints that the belief that women talk more than men may be reinforced by the biased interpretation of the conversations we hear.