Do Gender-Related Stereotypes Affect Spatial Performance? Exploring When, How and to Whom Using a Chronometric...

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Gender Studies

Background:

• Common belief attributes superior visuospatial abilities to males.
• This belief contributes to underrepresentation of women in STEM.
• Situational factors and implicit biases can create spurious gender differences in cognitive performance.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate how stereotype reactivation affects performance on 3D mental rotation tasks.
• Examine the role of explicit beliefs and implicit associations.
• Identify who is affected by stereotype reactivation and under what conditions.

Main Methods:

• Assessed explicit beliefs and implicit associations using the Implicit Association Test.
• Measured performance on a 3D mental rotation chronometric task (3DMRT).
• Administered stereotype-congruent, incongruent, and nullifying instructions to male and female humanities and STEM students.

Main Results:

• Implicit gender-science associations correlated with 3DMRT performance in both genders.
• Inter-gender differences in 3DMRT performance emerged only under stereotype-reactivating conditions.
• Self-confidence mediated instruction effects, and academic specialization moderated these effects, impacting humanities students more than STEM students.

Conclusions:

• The notion of inherent male superiority in mental rotation is an oversimplification.
• Stereotypes can induce artificial performance differences between genders.
• Situational factors and academic specialization play crucial roles in shaping gender-related cognitive performance in science-related tasks.