Women Are Warm, but She Isn’t: The Effect of Counter-Stereotypical Examples on the Application of Gender Stereotypes

This study examined the effect of counter-stereotypical examples in the application of gender stereotypes, particularly how and when they affect impression formation regarding warmth. Participants (N = 140) evaluated ambiguous drawings after being primed with stereotypical and counter-stereotypical individuals. Targets following counter-stereotypical female primes were evaluated as less warm than targets after stereotypical female primes. However, counter-stereotypical male primes did not prompt warmer evaluations; instead, they elicited the lowest warmth judgments. The multinomial model analysis revealed stereotype activation and application as significant processes explaining the responses, with activation acting as a mediator that negatively influenced application. Individual factors such as sexism and gender essentialism were negatively related to stereotype activation and application, while we found no association with participants’ motivations to respond without sexism. An exploratory analysis combining this data with a prior experiment (N = 136) showed that exposure to counter-stereotypical examples attenuated the dissociation between activation and application.