Interpersonal Verbs, Gender, and Implicit Causality

In the present report we describe a series of studies investigating whether women and men are regarded as equivalently able to cause outcomes in social interaction. Two experiments plus a follow-up study varied sex of actors, sex of recipients, and verb type and examined who is perceived to be more causal in brief verbal descriptions of interpersonal events. Results show that the gender of participants in a social interaction significantly affects perceptions of who initiates and who elicits interpersonal behaviors. When females are described as acting or feeling in mixed-gender pairs, they are viewed as less causal than males. At the same time, when men and women are recipients of others' actions, women more than men are perceived as having elicited the acts directed toward them. Interpretation centers on the lower status accorded women and on the power of language to sustain such arrangements. The results are seen as having implications for research in implicit causality and affect control theory.