Melanie C. Steffens

University of Kaiserslautern-Landau

In the present work, we addressed the relationship between parental leave policies and social norms. Using a pre‐registered, cross‐national approach, we examined the relationship between parental leave policies and the perception of social norms for the gender division of childcare. In this study, 19,259 students (11,924 women) from 48 countries in...

Based on the model of intersectional invisibility, we tested the consequences of work‐related misbehavior for women of Turkish and German descent (i.e., misbehavior involving mistakes that are stereotypically associated with masculine or feminine traits, eliciting negative evaluations). Across a series of four preregistered experiments ( N s = 746,...

Awareness of racial biases can foster empathy and solidarity with racially marginalized groups. However, contemporary experiences of everyday racism are often ambiguous and challenging to detect as previously blatant forms of racism are nowadays expressed more subtle and less obvious. This underscores the need for validated, reliable instruments to...

Precarious Manhood Theory argues that masculinity is a fragile social status requiring continuous public proof, while femininity is seen as a biologically based, stable identity. Extensive research on masculinity threat has largely overlooked the distinct nature of femininity and its associated threats. For women, physical appearance and the pursui...

In current social–psychological models, social identification has been placed center stage for explaining solidarity-based attitudes and behaviors. However, from the perspective of personality psychology, justice sensitivity has also been identified as influencing advantaged group members’ solidarity for disadvantaged groups (other-related justice...

The functioning of representative democracy depends on a “responsible electorate” that rewards and punishes parties according to their promises. Holding representatives accountable is the only way for voters to keep control over the government. This article draws on the normative assumption of accountability theory to investigate the impact of info...

Previous research has established that intergroup threat is pivotal to intergroup relations in divided societies. We used the Northern Ireland Assembly Elections in 2022 as a unique chance to investigate how elections can affect feelings of threat and intergroup relations between communities with a history of violent intergroup conflict. We argued...

Gun violence is a serious problem in the United States and elsewhere and more so among men than women. We conducted an experiment to examine if men whose masculinity was threatened are more attracted to guns than non-threatened men, presumably to compensate for the threat. After completing a gender knowledge test, men (N = 168) randomly received ei...

Despite continuing progress, men remain underrepresented in childcare, domestic labor, and other care work. Because parental leave is discussed as a gateway to increasing men’s childcare engagement, we aimed to gain insights into predictors of men’s parental leave-taking intentions during the transition to parenthood. Using outcomes on a continuum...

Using data from 15 countries, this article investigates whether descriptive and prescriptive gender norms concerning housework and child care (domestic work) changed after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results of a total of 8,343 participants (M = 19.95, SD = 1.68) from two comparable student samples suggest that descriptive norms about unpai...

Since the early days of (phonetic) convergence research, one of the main questions is which individuals are more likely to adapt their speech to others. Especially differences between women and men have been researched with a high intensity. Using a differential approach as well, we complement the existing literature by focusing on another gender-r...

National identification strength is a key Euroscepticism driver. We examine how politicians' framing of immigration policies increases the salience of different national identity representations and its relationship with support for the European Union (EU) in a two-waves between-subject survey-experiment using French and German samples. As predicte...

Despite global commitments and efforts, a gender‐based division of paid and unpaid work persists. To identify how psychological factors, national policies, and the broader sociocultural context contribute to this inequality, we assessed parental‐leave intentions in young adults (18–30 years old) planning to have children (N = 13,942; 8,880 identifi...

This between-subject survey experiment, conducted in two waves using a German sample (N=1,166 in Wave 1, N=829 in Wave 2), examined the hypothesis that identity-related frames – specifically, assimilation versus multicultural – affect outgroup prejudice and admission policy preferences by increasing the salience of different national identity repre...

Paper accepted for publication in EUP on 13 November, 2022 National identification strength is a key Euroscepticism driver. We examine how politicians’ framing of immigration policies increases the salience of different national identity representations and its relationship with support for the European Union (EU) in a two-waves between-subject su...

Paper accepted for publication in IJIR in on December 4, 2022 This between-subject survey experiment, conducted in two waves using a German sample (N=1,166 in Wave 1, N=829 in Wave 2), examined the hypothesis that identity-related frames – specifically, assimilation versus multicultural – affect outgroup prejudice and admission policy preferences...

Research investigating occupational aspirations in childhood is scarce. In addition, most research on occupational aspirations has focused on increasing the number of women in agentic jobs. In the present work, we investigate factors associated with communal occupational aspirations in two studies with young children (Study 1: 159 children [84 boys...

Which different feelings and reactions do different family members show if an adult family member who has long been perceived as heterosexual discloses their sexual identity as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB)? Previous studies have investigated reactions of spouses and sometimes children in the United States. This article describes the findings of...

Concerning race and its intertwinements with gender, sexual orientation, class, accents, or ability there is a scarcity of social psychological research in Europe. With an intersectional approach studying racism in Europe it is possible to detect specific experiences of discrimination. The prevalent understanding of European racism is connected to...

Impression formation can be biased by group stereotypes. Experiments on impression formation in the hiring context in which applicants' sexual orientation was manipulated have yielded mixed findings: positive, negative, or no stereotyping and discrimination of lesbian or gay applicants. However, impressions of individuals depend on more than their...

The large number of refugees and host countries’ citizens’ reactions regarding their admission have been major global issues. Thus, psychological interventions to foster intergroup relations in the asylum context are desirable. In three experiments with general population samples (N = 986), we adapted a paradoxical thinking intervention to the inte...

Men are currently underrepresented in traditionally female care-oriented (communal) engagement such as taking parental leave, whereas they are overrepresented in traditionally male (agentic) engagement such as breadwinning or leadership. We examined to what extent different prototypical representations of men affect men’s self-reported parental lea...

As millions of people flee their countries due to violent conflict and climate change, high support from host societies is desperately needed. One option to increase support could be to induce emotional reactions that elicit prosocial action. To facilitate a needs-adequate support it is important to know if prosocial emotions lead to specific proso...

Since the increase in numbers of refugees worldwide, the acceptance of refugees in host countries is a highly contested topic. Negative attitudes towards refugees pose a challenge to both integration efforts and social cohesion. So-called paradoxical interventions help mitigating such extreme attitudes, but little is known about the cognitive proce...

Given negative social identity, different perceptions of the structure of an intergroup relation (i.e., stability, legitimacy, permeability) should be related to different identity‐management strategies (i.e., social competition, social creativity, or individual mobility) depending on group identification. This is among the basic tenets of social i...

As millions of people flee their countries due to violent conflict and climate change, high support from host societies is desperately needed. One option to increase support could be to induce emotional reactions that elicit prosocial action. To facilitate a needs adequate support it is important to know if prosocial emotions lead to specific proso...

The potential of sexist jokes in comedy to harm women has been a matter of intense public debate. Psychological research on sexist comedy is scarce and inconclusive. Theory on social identity threat suggests that communicating devaluation and negative group stereotypes impairs the performance of members of a targeted group: Do women exposed to sexi...

Evidence suggests that accents can be typically more powerful in activating ethnicity categorization than appearance. Concurrently, some social categories, such as ethnicity, can be linked with other categories, such as religion. We investigate how people categorize those who belong to a (mis)matching pair of categories? In the present study, we in...

Previous research has claimed that diversity erodes trust, even though the empirical evidence is mixed and restricted to ethnic neighborhood diversity. Against the backdrop of increasing diversity within the political sphere and concurrently declining political trust, we examined the impact of social diversity on trust in groups of political repres...

Since the increase in numbers of refugees worldwide, the acceptance of refugees in host countries is a highly contested topic. Negative attitudes towards refugees pose a challenge to both integration efforts and social cohesion. So-called paradoxical interventions help mitigating such extreme attitudes, but little is known about the cognitive proce...

Attitude-change research requires sound attitude measures adequately predicting behavior. Most existing attitude measures focus on the cognitive (and some on the affective) attitude component (while neglecting the behavioral component). The present research introduces the SABA, a brief scale that consists of Scenarios measuring the Affective and Be...

This meta-analysis evaluated theoretical predictions from balanced identity theory (BIT) and evaluated the validity of zero points of Implicit Association Test (IAT) and self-report measures used to test these predictions. Twenty-one researchers contributed individual subject data from 36 experiments (total N = 12,773) that used both explicit and i...

Given negative social identity, different perceptions of the structure of an intergroup relation (i.e., stability, legitimacy, permeability) should be related to different identity‐management strategies (i.e., social competition, social creativity, or individual mobility) depending on group identification. This is among the basic tenets of social i...

The way public figures react to criticism can influence perceptions of and trust in them. We tested whether politicians who openly accepted criticism were perceived as more moral and warmer (i.e., more communal) and were trusted more than politicians who rejected criticism. Using fictitious politicians, Experiments 1-3 showed the expected positive...

Sozialpsychologische Theorien zum Zusammenspiel sozialer Identitäten und Stereotypen können Leistungsunterschiede bei Frauen, Männern und Jugendlichen mit und ohne Migrationshintergrund erklären. Menschen identifizieren sich mit unterschiedlichen sozialen Gruppen, u. a. mit dem Geschlecht, der Herkunftskultur und der Kultur des Aufenthaltslandes. W...

Diversity training is a popular strategy to reduce prejudice within educational settings. However, in practice, diversity training rarely relies on social-psychological theory, and research on its effectiveness in real-world settings is scarce. Previous research regarding diversity training has particularly neglected an important theoretical concep...

Research has shown that vicarious contact can help to reduce prejudice. We tested the effect of a controlled, video-based vicarious-contact intervention on straight men’s (implicit and explicit) attitudes toward gay men. Findings of Experiment 1 (n = 99 German participants) failed to show direct effects but were in line with the idea that negative...

Although sexual orientation (SO) is perceptually ambiguous, people are able to detect it with above-chance accuracy from faces and, sometimes, from voices. Despite a multitude of “gaydar” studies, it is unclear (1) whether vocal or facial signals carry more SO information, (2) whether raters refer to target’s SO instead of gender-role conformity wh...

The emotional seesaw phenomenon (ESP) is a social-influence technique in which a person experiences a certain emotion, where the external stimulus that evoked the emotion suddenly disappears. Large effects on compliance and impaired cognitive functioning were reported after ESPs. The present research (total N = 163) tests a generalization of this p...

We review the evidence that mothers, compared to childless women or fathers, are discriminated at work (“motherhood penalty”), and that fathers may receive “caregiver penalties”. We conclude that (implicitly or explicitly) expected family roles appear to determine parenthood penalties. On this basis, we examined penalties for fathers who are only a...

Members of different groups often disagree when it comes to determining which group most accurately represents a shared superordinate group. Many studies have shown that the ingroup is often perceived as more prototypical of a superordinate category than the outgroup (i.e., relative prototypicality effect). This higher perceived congruence (overlap...

Whereas popular wisdom often centers on character differences between women and men when explaining work-related behavior, Kanter (1977) predicted that the proportion of women and men present in organizations is the crucial factor: With unequal proportions, women (similar to other minority persons) are singled out as “tokens” and gender becomes sal...

Traditional gender stereotypes encompass (typically masculine) agency, comprising task-related competence, and (typically feminine) communion or warmth. Both agency and communion are important for successful performance in many jobs. Stereotypes of gay men include the perception that they are less gender-typed than their heterosexual counterparts a...

Vertreter/innen der Programme-to-Policy-Linkage-Forschung konnten zeigen, dass die Kongruenz von in Wahlprogrammen gegebenen und tatsächlich zu Regierungszeiten umgesetzten Wahlversprechen im Langzeitvergleich und systemunabhängig hoch ausfällt. Die Bevölkerung etablierter demokratischer Staaten nimmt dagegen mehrheitlich an, dass Wahlversprechen i...

While the perception of sexual orientation in voices often relies on stereotypes, it is unclear whether speech stereotypes and accurate perceptions of sexual orientation are each based on acoustic cues common to speakers of a given group. We ask if the stereotypical belief, that members of the same sexual orientation group share similar acoustic pa...

Wav: Bisexual female–self-rated sexual orientation. (WAV)

Wav: Bisexual male–sexual orientation rated by others. (WAV)

Wav gay male–self-rated sexual orientation. (WAV)

Wav straight male–self-rated sexual orientation. (WAV)

Wav lesbian female–sexual orientation rated by others. (WAV)

Wav: Lesbian female–self-rated sexual orientation. (WAV)

Wav: Bisexual male–self-rated sexual orientation. (WAV)

Wav: Gay male–sexual orientation rated by others. (WAV)

Wav: Straight female–self-rated sexual orientation. (WAV)

Wav: Bisexual female–sexual orientation rated by others. (WAV)

Wav: Straight female–sexual orientation rated by others. (WAV)

Wav straight male–sexual orientation rated by others. (WAV)

Contrary to the popular notion of the pledge-breaking politician, research has revealed that governing political parties fulfill most of their pre-election pledges. This discrepancy between public perception and scientific findings could be the result of citizens’ looser definition of election pledges. Thus, as citizens’ assessment of pledge fulfil...

Purpose: This study aims to give an integrative answer on which speech stereotypes exist toward German gay and straight men, whether and how acoustic correlates of actual and perceived sexual orientation are connected, and how this relates to masculinity/femininity. Hence, it tests speech stereotype accuracy in the context of sexual orientation. M...

Social categorization appears to be an automatic process that occurs during person perception. Understanding social categorization better is important because mere categorization can lead to stereotype activation and, in turn, to discrimination. In the present study we used a novel approach to examine event-related potentials (ERPs) of gender categ...

The present article introduces a model based on cognitive consistency principles to predict how new identities become integrated into the self-concept, with consequences for intergroup attitudes. The model specifies four concepts (self-concept, stereotypes, identification, and group compatibility) as associative connections. The model builds on two...

Although effective interventions to increase international collective action for human rights are highly desirable, the validation of theory-based interventions and their transfer to this practical field is still scarce. We investigated whether collective action intention can be improved by using a diversity intervention technique rooted in social...

Sozialpsychologische Theorien zum Zusammenspiel sozialer Identitäten und Stereotypen können Leistungsunterschiede bei Frauen, Männern und Jugendlichen mit und ohne Migrationshintergrund erklären. Menschen identifizieren sich mit unterschiedlichen sozialen Gruppen, u. a. mit dem Geschlecht, der Herkunftskultur und der Kultur des Aufenthaltslandes. W...

Psychological research has neglected people whose accent does not match their appearance. Most research on person perception has focused on appearance, overlooking accents that are equally important social cues. If accents were studied, it was often done in isolation (i.e., detached from appearance). We examine how varying accent and appearance inf...

The question how intergroup bias can be alleviated is of much theoretical and practical interest. Whereas diversity training and the multiculturalism ideology are two approaches prominent in practice, most theoretical models on reducing intergroup bias are based on social-identity theory and self-categorization theory. This social-identity perspect...

SPSS data file providing the raw data of experiment 1. (SAV)

SPSS data file providing the raw data of experiment 2. (SAV)

SPSS data file providing the raw data of experiment 3. (SAV)

Compared to studies of male speakers, relatively few studies have investigated acoustic correlates of sexual orientation in women. The present investigation focuses on shedding more light on intra-group variability in lesbians and straight women by using a fine-grained analysis of sexual orientation and collecting data on psychological characterist...

Background and objectives: Cognitive models assume that negative self-evaluations are automatically activated in individuals with Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) during social situations, increasing their individual level of anxiety. This study examined automatic self-evaluations (i.e., implicit self-esteem) and state anxiety in a group of individua...

Recent studies demonstrated that the sequential induction of contrasting negative and positive emotions can be used as a social influence technique. The original field experiments found that whenever a sudden change in the emotional dynamic occurs – from negative to positive or vice versa – an increase in compliant behavior and an impairment in cog...

Most research on ethnicity has focused on visual cues. However, accents are strong social cues that can match or contradict visual cues. We examined understudied reactions to people whose one cue suggests one ethnicity, whereas the other cue contradicts it. In an experiment conducted in Germany, job candidates spoke with an accent either congruent...

A theoretical perspective that may help explain conflict between diverse groups is the ingroup projection model (Mummendey & Wenzel, 1999). Ingroup projection is an ethnocentric representation of a superordinate group that renders the ingroup relatively more prototypical (thus more normative, positive and deserving) than an outgroup believes is the...

The intention-superiority effect denotes faster response latencies to stimuli linked with a prospective memory task compared to stimuli linked with no prospective task or with a cancelled task. It is generally assumed that the increased accessibility of intention-related materials contributes to successful execution of prospective memory tasks at a...

Most research on ethnicity in neuroscience and social psychology has focused on visual cues. However, accents are central social markers of ethnicity and strongly influence evaluations of others. Here, we examine how varying auditory (vocal accent) and visual (facial appearance) information about others affects neural correlates of ethnicity-relate...

Only a few published experiments directly tested the influence of applicants’ sexual orientation on hiring decisions and related judgments. The present chapter reviews theoretical models of impression formation and applies them to discrimination based on sexual orientation. The basis of our reasoning is formed by the stereotype-content model, the l...

Previous research has demonstrated that emphasizing diversity within superordinate groups can either improve or impair subgroup relations. The present research investigated whether this can depend on the way in which diversity is activated. We activated diversity by presenting central or peripheral subgroups. We tested the effects on group-based co...