Implicit gender stereotyping in judgments of fame

Implicit (unconscious) gender stereotyping in fame judgments was tested with an adaptation of a procedure developed by L. L. Jacoby, C. M. Kelley, J. Brown, and J. Jasechko (1989). In Experiments 1-4, participants pronounced 72 names of famous and nonfamous men and women, and 24 or 48 hr later made fame judgments in response to the 72 familiar and 72 unfamiliar famous and nonfamous names. These first experiments, in which signal detection analysis was used to assess implicit stereotypes, demonstrate that the gender bias (greater assignment of fame to male than female names) was located in the use of a lower criterion (beta) for judging fame of familiar male than female names. Experiments 3 and 4 also showed that explicit expressions of sexism or stereotypes were uncorrelated with the observed implicit gender bias in fame judgments.