The present research aimed to extend the state of knowledge regarding the relationship between self-perceived empathy and traditional gender roles and placed particular focus on the contextual conditions under which gender differences in empathy are present, can be created, or eliminated. Across two studies, women rated themselves higher in empathy than men in all experimental conditions, whereas an objective female superiority in emotion recognition was only evident in one condition. In Study 1 (n = 736), using the term ‘social-analytic capacity’ instead of ‘empathic capacity’ increased gender differences in self-reported empathy and resulted in women performing better in the Eyes-test than men. In a neutral task (verbal intelligence), gender differences (in this case, a male superiority), were only found when participants believed that this task had an association with empathy. In Study 2 (n = 701), gender differences in self-reported empathic capacity, but not in performance in emotion recognition, increased when motivation for empathy was raised. Further, gender-role orientation mediated the association between gender and self-reported empathic capacity, whereas it did not account for the association between gender and emotion recognition. Overall, the present studies provide strong support for the idea that empathy is influenced by contextual factors and can be systematically biased by gender roles and stereotypical beliefs.

The Accumulated Clues Task (ACT; Bowers et al., 1990) is a semantic problem-solving paradigm that has primarily been used in research on intuitive processes and as an experimental model of insight. In this incremental task, participants are instructed to find a solution word that is implied by a list of clue words with increasing semantic proximity to the solution word. We present a German version of the ACT, consisting of 20 word lists with 15 clues each, and report norming studies testing its psychometric properties and their relations to psycholinguistic features of the stimulus material (total N = 300). The results are reported and discussed for future research employing this stimulus pool, which can be easily adapted to varying experimental set-ups and research questions.

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