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Consensual affect cues of fellow group participants raised or lowered the perceived quality of identical leadership performances. Subjects viewed a color videotape of a scripted group discussion by a leader and four group members. Leader's suggestions, members' compliance, and the focal action of discussion content were the same in all conditions. Two nonfocal consensus variables, authority legitimation of the leader and group members' nonverbal "leakage" cues of affective reaction to the leader, were manipulated by tape editing in factorial design and replicated on two leaders, a male and a female. Both leaders' performances with authority legitimation or nonverbal peer approval were evaluated higher than the identical performances without legitimation or disapproved by peers. The results showed that a difference in the affective consensus surrounding a performance could produce discriminatory evaluations of equally competent men and women, and equalizing the consensus values could eliminate discriminatory bias. Consensus cues were not manipulated for the other stimulus group members, and men were rated higher than equally competent women.

This study investigated the impact of television commercials on women's selfconfidence and independence of judgment. Two matched series of commercials served as stimuli. One series consisted of four replicas of current network commercials. The other series consisted of the same four commercials, identical in every respect except that each of the roles in the scenario was portrayed by a person of the opposite sex. Subjects (N = 52 college women) viewed either the traditional or reversed-role series. Those exposed to the nontraditional versions showed more independence of judgment in an Asch-type conformity test and displayed greater self-confidence when delivering a speech, thus supporting the hypothesis that commercials function as social cues to trigger and reinforce sex role stereotypes. The findings suggest that repeated exposure to nonstereotypic commercials might help produce positive and lasting behavioral changes in women.The greater power of the male to control his own destiny is part of the cultural stereotype of maleness and is inherent in the images of the two sexes portrayed on television and in print. (Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974, p. 157) Requests for reprints should be sent to Joyce

No abstract

Subjects viewed a videotaped group discussion by a leader and four other group members and evaluated each of them for leadership competence. The leader, either a man or a woman, was either personally endorsed (“legitimized”) or unendorsed by either a male or a female authority figure. Legitimation raised both leaders' performance evaluations. Legitimation by the female authority affected the leaders' evaluations, overall, as much as legitimation by a male authority. For the male leader, legitimation by the male and female authority figures produced equal impact. However, legitimation by the female authority figure produced significantly greater impact on evaluations of the female leader's performance than the same legitimation by a male authority figure. The data suggest that female authority figures can be effective legitimizers of both sexes, but male authority's endorsements of a female subordinate may be viewed as suspect.