Month/Year of Graduation

5-2021

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science (B.S.)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Carey Ryan

Abstract

Research has shown that people often support social systems that are not in their best interests (Kay & Jost, 2003). One way that people may justify support for such social systems is by focusing on beneficial characteristics. For example, people exhibit greater system justification when people are described as poor but happy (complementary attributes) as opposed to poor and unhappy (non-complementary attributes) (Kay & Jost, 2003). The present study examined the effects of complementary (i.e., that women and men fulfill different career roles) versus competitive (i.e., that women and men compete for the same career roles) gender stereotypes on women’s and men’s system justification and tolerance of sexism. Participants, who were recruited through Prolific Academic, were randomly assigned to read one of two ostensible news articles modeled after Eagly et. al. (2020), which described gender career roles as competitive or complementary. Participants then completed measures of system justification (Jost & Banaji, 1994) and tolerance of sexism (Folberg et. al., 2021) The results revealed only that men tolerate and justify sexism more than women. Additionally, participants who were assigned to the competitive (vs. complementary) condition scored higher on system justification. No significant interactions between gender and condition were found.

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