Matthew D Hammond

Victoria University of Wellington · School of Psychology

Researchers can unintentionally reinforce societal prejudice against minoritized populations through the false assumption that psychological measurements are generalizable across identities. Recently, researchers have posited that gender and sexually diverse (GSD) people could feel excluded or confused by the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI) due t...

People in the LGBTQIA+ community (i.e., lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and other gender/sexual minorities) experience greater rates of intimate partner aggression (IPA) than the general population and have fewer help-seeking pathways available. The current research examined the extent to which LGBTQIA+ people’s perce...

Background Aotearoa New Zealand does not provide publicly-funded intensive autism support. While parent-mediated supports are promising, children and families may also benefit from direct clinician support. We tested the efficacy of a low-intensity programme involving parent- and clinician-delivered support for autistic children. Methods This sing...

People who feel powerless are motivated to gain power, which may include men endorsing hostile sexism to affirm societal power or women endorsing benevolent sexism to affirm power in relationships. We used four waves of an annual longitudinal panel sample (N = 58,405) to test whether within-person changes in powerlessness predicted subsequent chang...

We examined associations between sexist beliefs and tolerance of violence against women in India using a nationally representative probability sample of adults ( n = 133,398). Research consistently indicates that hostile sexism fosters tolerance of violence against women. However, benevolent sexism is sometimes associated with higher tolerance and...

Women’s everyday experiences of benevolent sexism include being praised for loving men (heterosexual intimacy), praised for caregiving (complementary gender differentiation), and being overhelped (protective paternalism). We investigated women’s perceptions of partners and their wellbeing in the context of self-reported experiences of benevolent se...

We examined whether the impact of the pandemic on couple relationships varied across cultural contexts. Following from studies showing better outcomes (lower disease risk, greater well-being) within cultures higher in tightness (having strong norms promoting conformity) or collectivism (vs. individualism), we predicted that tighter and more collect...

We examined whether the impact of the pandemic on couple relationships varied across cultural contexts. Following from studies showing better outcomes (lower disease risk, greater well-being) within cultures higher in tightness (having strong norms promoting conformity) or collectivism (vs. individualism), we predicted that tighter and more collect...

Heteronormative dating scripts involve expectations for women and men to enact different behaviours in romantic contexts with one another, such as men paying on dates and making marriage proposals. While previous research has shown that sexism and feminist identity predicts the endorsement of these scripts, there is a lack of research on other pote...

Past studies indicated that environmental messages incorporating binding morals (i.e., loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, purity/degradation) were effective in reducing the negative association between political conservatism and pro-environmentalism. We conceptually replicated and extended this finding through open science practices. In a pilo...

We examined associations between sexist beliefs and tolerance of violence against women in India using a nationally representative probability sample (n = 128,947). Research consistently indicates that hostile sexism fosters tolerance of gender violence. However, benevolent sexism is sometimes associated with higher tolerance and sometimes with low...

Objective: We investigated the characteristics of loneliness by identifying distinct 'profiles' of loneliness and investigating transitions between those loneliness profiles over two years. Method: We conducted Latent Transition Analyses on two years of data from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (N=15,820) and modelled how people's hea...

Interpersonal power involves how much actors can influence partners (actor power) and how much partners can influence actors (partner power). Yet, most theories and investigations of power conflate the effects of actor and partner power, creating a fundamental ambiguity in the literature regarding how power shapes social behavior. We demonstrate th...

Past studies indicated that environmental messages incorporating binding morals (i.e., loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation morals) were effective in reducing the negative association between political conservatism and pro-environmentalism. We conceptually replicated and extended this finding through open science practic...

The current research examined the phenomenon of fading affect bias – the tendency for affect associated with negative events to fade more than affect associated with positive events – within the context of romantic relationships. Participants recalled and evaluated positive and negative relationship-specific and non-relationship autobiographical ev...

Ambivalent Sexism Theory (Glick & Fiske, 1996) has revolutionised understanding of sexism and generated a new way of examining sexist attitudes using the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI). One key goal in sexism research is to compare sexist attitudes across different groups, including people with different genders and sexual identities. Before doi...

Concerns about the effects of climate change are mainstream, and the climate crisis might have greater psychological impact on younger people. We hypothesise that climate concern will have detrimental links with psychological wellbeing over time, and that this association will be more pronounced among younger adults. We test our pre-registered pred...

Intimate relationships are a principal source of emotional support, which fosters recipients' health and well-being. Yet, being in a position to provide support can be stressful, particularly if people are burdened with their own emotional difficulties, and such stress may interfere with people's ability to behave in emotionally supportive ways. Th...

Feeling like an impostor is common among successful individuals, but particularly among women and early-career professionals. Here, we investigated how gender and career-stage differences in impostor feelings vary as a function of the contexts that academics have to navigate. In particular, we focused on a powerful but underexplored contextual feat...

Hostile sexism encompasses beliefs about the risks of depending on women, so men’s endorsement of hostile sexism should interrupt access to social support. Across two studies, U.S. and Canadian men who more strongly endorsed hostile sexism expressed lower satisfaction with support from female romantic partners (Study 1; N = 293) and lower desire fo...

Similarity within romantic couples forms one component of the formation and maintenance of relationships, meaning that, romantic partners’ views about themselves and the world are theorized to converge over time. We advance prior research on romantic couple similarities using cross-sectional or time-lagged designs, testing convergence with dyadic t...

Is having children related to benevolent sexism? Two theoretical accounts—benevolent sexism as role justification and benevolent sexism as a mating strategy—suggest the possibility of a positive and bidirectional association. Gender disparities in childrearing could prompt inequality-justifying endorsement of benevolent sexism and/or endorsing bene...

COVID-19 lockdowns have required many working parents to balance domestic and paid labor while confined at home. Are women and men equally sharing the workload? Are inequities in the division of labor compromising relationships? Leveraging a pre-pandemic longitudinal study of couples with young children, we examine gender differences in the divisio...

According to ambivalent sexism theory, prejudice toward women has two forms: hostile (i.e., antipathy toward women) and benevolent (i.e., patronizing and paternalistic attitudes toward women). We investigated whether 5- to 11-year-old children’s gender attitudes exhibit this bipartite, ambivalent structure. Consistent with this possibility, latent...

How can we alleviate the political divide on environmental issues such as climate change? Baldwin and Lammers (2016, Study 1) found that an environmental message with a past temporal focus attenuated the negative association between participants’ conservatism and their pro-environmental attitudes, compared with a future-focused environmental messag...

COVID-19 lockdowns have required many working parents to balance domestic and paid labour while confined at home. Are women and men equally sharing the workload? Are inequities in the division of labour compromising relationships? Leveraging a pre-pandemic longitudinal study of couples with young children, we examine gender differences in the divis...

Given the powerful implications of relationship quality for health and well-being, a central mission of relationship science is explaining why some romantic relationships thrive more than others. This large-scale project used machine learning (i.e., Random Forests) to 1) quantify the extent to which relationship quality is predictable and 2) identi...

Hostile sexism expresses derogation of women’s competence and emphasizes that women will exploit men’s relational dependence. Men who endorse hostile sexism perceive their female partners more negatively, but do these negative perceptions stem from motives for dominance or insecurities about dependence? We tested both perspectives by assessing bias...

Ambivalent sexism theory recognizes that sexist attitudes maintain gender inequalities via sociocultural and close relationship processes. This review advances established work on sociocultural processes by showing how people's need for relationship security is also central to the sources and functions of sexism. Men's hostile sexism—overtly deroga...

Greater habitual emotional suppression (ES)-assessed by the suppression subscale of the emotion regulation questionnaire (ERQ-ES; Gross & John, 2003) and the Courtauld emotion control scale (CECS; Watson & Greer, 1983)-is associated with a range of negative outcomes, which are assumed to arise because habitual ES measures capture the tendency to us...

Maintaining autonomy in interdependent relationships is challenging, particularly for people high in attachment avoidance, who prioritize independence. Invisible support involves indirect, subtle behaviors that minimize the salience of dependence and encourage self-driven problem solving and thus should facilitate autonomy. The current research tes...

The current research examined the links between depressive symptomology and anxiety on the fading of affect associated with positive and negative autobiographical memories. Participants (N = 296) recalled and rated positive and negative events in terms of how pleasant or unpleasant they were at the time they occurred and at the time of event recoll...

Indirect support seeking involves sulking, whining, and/or displaying sadness to elicit social support. Ironically, this strategy tends to backfire by prompting rejection from close others. The current research examines how low self-esteem contributes to the use and relational consequences of indirect support seeking during couples' interactions. R...

We examine how relational needs underlie sexism by conducting a meta-analysis (k = 22; N = 4,860) on the links between adults’ romantic attachment and endorsement of ambivalent sexism. Results across two random-effects meta-analytic methods supported that men’s and women’s attachment anxiety predicted stronger endorsement of both benevolent sexism...

One reason gender inequality persists is because core needs in intimate relationships foster sexist attitudes. Benevolent sexism reveres women’s traditional caregiving roles and prescribes that men should cherish, protect, and provide for women. Benevolent sexism is appealing to both men and women because it promotes a gender role structure that pr...

Ambivalent sexism theory states that prejudice toward women comprises two interrelated ideologies. Endorsement of hostile sexism—aggressive and competitive attitudes toward women—is linked with endorsement of benevolent sexism—paternalistic and patronizing attitudes toward women. We conduct the first systematic tests of how endorsement of sexism di...

In this study, we asked participants to “describe their sexual orientation” in an open-ended measure of self-generated sexual orientation. The question was included as part of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (N = 18,261) 2013/2014 wave, a national probability survey conducted shortly after the first legal same-sex marriages in New Zealan...

Background: Loneliness has many negative physical and mental health ramifications and is most prevalent among vulnerable social groups. However, little is known about how loneliness is grouped within the population and the characteristics of those groups. Methods: We conducted a Latent Profile Analysis on 18,264 participants from the fifth wave...

There is debate about the abstractness of young children’s self-concepts—specifically, whether they include representations of (1) general traits and abilities and (2) the global self. Four studies (N = 176 children aged 4–7) suggested these representations are indeed part of early self-concepts. Studies 1 and 2 re-examined prior evidence that youn...

Prior research on effective support interactions in intimate relationships often focuses on support provision rather than how people seek support. The current study investigated how differences in relationship autonomy—authentic and self-determined relationship motivations—predicted the behavior and outcomes of couples (N = 80) in support interacti...

Stereotypes are typically defined as beliefs about groups, but this definition is underspecified. Beliefs about groups can be generic or statistical. Generic beliefs attribute features to entire groups (e.g., men are strong), whereas statistical beliefs encode the perceived prevalence of features (e.g., how common it is for men to be strong). The p...

Ambivalent sexism theory (Glick & Fiske, 1996) revolutionized understanding of sexist attitudes by revealing how attitudes expressing that women are incompetent and seek power over men (hostile sexism) are accompanied by more benevolent attitudes expressing that men are fulfilled by cherishing and protecting women (benevolent sexism). In the curren...

The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Prejudice aims to answer the questions: why is prejudice so persistent? How does it affect people exposed to it? And what can we do about it? Providing a comprehensive examination of prejudice from its evolutionary beginnings and environmental influences through to its manifestations and consequences, thi...

Hostile sexism encompasses aggressive attitudes toward women who contest men’s power and suspicions that women will manipulate men by exploiting their relational dependence. Prior research has shown that these attitudes predict greater aggression toward female relationship partners, but has overlooked the contexts in which such aggression should oc...

Testosterone reactivity has been conceptualized as a marker of social submission at low levels and social dominance at high levels. However, hormonal fluctuations in response to romantic partners remain largely unknown. Towards this end, 88 couples (N = 176) discussed an emotional video. Prior to the conversation, one member the dyad (the “agent”)...

Prior research indicates that emotional suppression exacerbates distress and reduces cognitive performance and self-control. We extend this prior work in the current studies by examining whether emotional suppression in specific goal-relevant contexts impedes people’s goal strivings and progress. In Study 1, participants (N = 146) provided reports...

When does power in intimate relationships shape important interpersonal behaviors, such as psychological aggression? Five studies tested whether possessing low relationship power was associated with aggressive responses, but (a) only within power-relevant relationship interactions when situational power was low, and (b) only by men because masculin...

Benevolent sexism prescribes that men are dependent on women in relationships and should cherish their partners. The current research examined whether perceiving male partners to endorse benevolent sexism attenuates highly anxious women’s negative reactions to relationship conflict. Greater attachment anxiety was associated with greater distress an...

The current research demonstrated that women's adoption of benevolent sexism is influenced by their perceptions of their intimate partners' agreement with benevolent sexism. In 2 dyadic longitudinal studies, committed heterosexual couples reported on their own sexism and perceptions of their partner's sexism twice across 9 months (Study 1) and 5 ti...

The current research demonstrates how benevolent sexism functions to undermine women's competence while facilitating men's access to heterosexual intimacy by prompting different support behaviors by men and women. Objective coders rated the support provision exhibited during heterosexual couples' (N = 100) video-recorded discussions of each other's...

Benevolent sexism (BS) contains prescriptive partner expectations that should foster an intolerance of discrepancies between partners and warmth/trustworthiness ideal standards. This longitudinal study tested whether endorsing BS magnifies the degree to which warmth/trustworthiness partner-ideal discrepancies are associated with willingness to diss...

The current research tested whether individuals high in attachment anxiety react to relationship threats in ways that can help them feel secure and satisfied in their relationship. Individuals higher in attachment anxiety experienced greater hurt feelings on days they faced partner criticism or conflict (Study 1) and during observed conflict discus...

Hostile sexism (HS) expresses attitudes that characterize women who challenge men's power as manipulative and subversive. Does endorsing HS negatively bias perceptions of women's behavior and, in turn, create animosity within intimate relationships? Committed heterosexual couples reported on their own behavior and perceptions of their partner's beh...

Benevolent sexism functions to uphold gender inequality by expressing caring and reverent attitudes exclusively toward women. Do these subjective benefits lure women to endorse benevolent sexism? We tested this by examining whether women’s psychological entitlement was associated with concurrent levels of benevolent sexism and longitudinal changes...

Benevolent sexism promises women a revered place within intimate relationships, which should lead to greater dissatisfaction when they face relationship difficulties. We collected self-reports of relationship problems and relationship satisfaction (Study 1; N = 91 heterosexual couples), relationship problems and relationship evaluations daily over...

Are depressive symptoms associated with more biased or more accurate interpersonal perceptions? Both members of committed heterosexual couples (N = 78) reported on their perceptions of their partner's commitment and behavior daily across a 3-week period. Using the partner's reports as the benchmark, participants who reported more depressive symptom...

Research indicates that the endorsement of sexist ideology is linked to higher subjective wellbeing for both men and women. We examine gender differences in the rationalisations which drive this effect in an egalitarian nation (New Zealand). Results from a nationally representative sample (N = 6,100) indicated that the endorsement of Benevolent Sex...

This study extends the Mini-IPIP, a short measure of the Big-Five personality dimensions, to a Big-Six model of personality structure based on the HEXACO. Exploratory and Confirmatory analyses of a representative New Zealand sample (N = 5,562) validated the original Mini-IPIP five-factor structure, and supported an extended six-factor model also in...