Interpersonal Reasons for Interpersonal Perceptions: Gender-incongruent Purpose Goals and Nonverbal Judgment Accuracy

Gender Roles and Empathic Accuracy: The Role of Communion in Reading Minds

“…For example, Koenig and Eagly (2005) showed that when participants were primed to believe that a test of interpersonal sensitivity was a feminine (versus neutral) task, women's accuracy was not affected. Similarly, Horgan and Smith (2006) found that women's interpersonal sensitivity was not affected by a manipulation that primed a feminine (versus a neutral or masculine) role. Of course, neither of these studies used the Ickes' paradigm, which underscores the possibility that different measures of interpersonal sensitivity are capturing different aspects of what it means to be interpersonally accurate (e.g., Lewis and Hodges unpublished), and highlights the fact that in the present research we are focusing only on empathic accuracy using the Ickes paradigm, and are not trying to generalize our results to other measures of interpersonal sensitivity.…”

Are Women Always More Interpersonally Sensitive Than Men? Impact of Goals and Content Domain

“…Klein and Hodges (2001) produced better performance among women, but not men, by framing an interpersonal sensitivity task to suggest that the skill is stereotypically female (related to empathy). Horgan and Smith (2006) framed their interpersonal sensitivity test as either stereotypically male (related to military interrogation) or female (related to social work). These manipulations did not improve performance over the level of a control group for either sex, but each sex did worse, compared to the control group, when told the skill was relevant to the opposite sex (military interrogation for women and social work for men).…”

Men’s Interpersonal (mis)Perception: Fitting in with Gender Norms Following Social Rejection

“…Study 1 was designed to examine whether and how reliving a rejection experience from a same-sex other via a writing task (Pickett et al 2004) influenced men's assimilation to gender norms transmitted by a task framing manipulation (Horgan and Smith 2006) on an objective measure of IP skills, the Interpersonal Perceptions Task (Costanzo and Archer 1989). We expected that when reflecting upon a time men felt vulnerable to social rejection, men would be more likely to conform to the ingroup's gender norms in an attempt to reestablish the threatened social ties (Hertel and Kerr 2001;.…”

“…The gender norm of the in-group should dictate the behaviors needed to rejoin or "fit in" with the group (Walsh and Smith 2007). Given that men, as a group, are stereotyped as insensitive (Horgan and Smith 2006;Leyens et al 2000;Gabriel and Gardner 1999;Cross and Madson 1997;Briton and Hall 1995), acting in accordance with the gender norms of the masculine ingroup requires men to behave less interpersonally perceptive. Indeed, Ickes et al (2000) argued that when gender differences are found in tests of interpersonal perception skills, these differences may be due to a differential desire to be seen as interpersonally perceptive, as opposed to real differential skills.…”

“…We were particularly interested in the influence of gender group norms because of the reliable finding that men perform worse than women on tests of interpersonal perception (Hall 1978;. Typically, men are thought of as less interpersonally sensitive than women (Briton and Hall 1995;Spence and Buckner 2000;Horgan and Smith 2006;Leyens et al 2000), but this portrayal is complicated. Gender stereotypes often translate into perceptions about the traits associated with an individual, but more importantly, gender stereotypes are also heavily prescriptive.…”