Exchanging the Generic Masculine for Gender- Balanced Forms - The Impact of Context Valence

Research on the generic masculine (i.e., male nouns used in gender-overlapping or gender-abstracting way) and its alternatives has repeatedly revealed that in German the generic masculine is more strongly associated with male persons than other types of generic. As research has only been done in positive or neutral contexts we extended a study by Stahlberg et al. (2001 , Experiment 1) to test whether the results can be generalized across valences. The experiment (N = 156) revealed that gender-balancing forms are more frequently associated with women than the generic masculine. This held especially true for male participants. With reference to the valence manipulation female participants tended to show asymmetric ingroup favoritism whereas male participants’ preference for same sex associations was indifferent to the valence manipulation. Results are discussed in light of cognitive and motivational consequences of the different generics.