Higher social power increases occupational gender stereotyping in Chinese culture

Prior studies have used the perspective of the social function of social power (such as how power affects interpersonal interaction between the powerful and the powerless) to explore how powerful people stereotype powerless people. In the present research, we further explored how high and low levels of social power affect occupational gender stereotyping from the perspective of how social power affects cognitive processing, that is, social categorization. We proposed that higher social power-primed participants, compared to low social power-primed participants, would be more inclined to use category-based representation and thus use stereotyping. In two studies, we investigated these effects and found that high social power, compared to low social power, increased occupational gender stereotyping in Chinese culture.