Date of Award

Fall 2022

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Psychology

Abstract

Sexism continues to be prevalent within today’s society (Bates, 2012; Crandall et al., 2018; World Health Organization, 2021), creating the need for methods to respond to such bias. Confrontation is one method that allows targets of sexism to stand up for themselves (Haslett & Lipman, 1997; Hyers, 2007; Kaiser & Miller, 2004), but often comes with social costs (e.g., being disliked, Czopp & Monteith, 2003; Dodd et al., 2001; Gulker et al., 2013; Kaiser & Miller, 2001). However, researchers have not dissected the factors that affect the social costs associated with confrontation (i.e., being labeled as a “sexist”, humor, or derogation; Woodzicka et al., 2020). Existing research typically confounds related forms of threat (Becker & Barreto, 2014; Gervais & Hillard, 2014) and has not yet examined the unique contributions of threat and humor on social costs (Woodzicka et al., 2020). Therefore, the current proposal examines the influence of three types of threat posed by confrontation on social costs for confronters: confrontation (i.e., labeling the perpetrator as “sexist” or using a bias-neutral confrontation), humor (i.e., using a humorous or serious confrontation), and derogation (i.e., using a derogative or non-derogative confrontation). It is predicted that there will be main effects for confrontation (i.e., bias-neutral confrontations will be perceived more favorable than sexist confrontations), humor (i.e., humorous confrontations will be perceived more favorable than serious confrontations) and derogation (i.e., non-derogative confrontations will be perceived more favorable than derogative confrontations). A three-way interaction is also predicted between confrontation, humor, and derogation.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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