Renata Bongiorno

Bath Spa University · School of Sciences

Role congruity theory predicts prejudice towards women who meet the agentic requirements of the leader role. In line with recent findings indicating greater acceptance of agentic behaviour from women, we find evidence for a more subtle form of prejudice towards women who fail to display agency in leader roles. Using a classic methodology, the agenc...

Images of scantily clad women are used by advertisers to make products more attractive to men. This "sex sells" approach is increasingly employed to promote ethical causes, most prominently by the animal-rights organization PETA. Yet sexualized images can dehumanize women, leaving an unresolved paradox - is it effective to advertise an ethical caus...

The #MeToo movement has highlighted the widespread problem of men’s sexual harassment of women. Women are typically reluctant to make a sexual-harassment complaint and often encounter victim-blaming attitudes when they do, especially from men. Informed by the social identity perspective, two experiments examined the influence of empathy—both for wo...

Men’s association with leadership is assumed to rest on stereotypes of men as more Agentic (strong, decisive, competent) and less Communal (helpful, kind, friendly) than women. Yet shortcomings in theory, measurement and analyses have obscured the nature of this bias. We use an expanded Power-Benevolence theoretical framework of stereotype content...

A popular form of neoliberal feminism seeks to advance gender equality in leadership and beyond by encouraging women to be resilient as individuals. By locating career advancement as within an individual's control, recent research has shown that this focus subtly shifts the blame for gender inequality onto women and reduces support for needed struc...

Collective action is a powerful tool for social change and is fundamental to women and girls’ empowerment on a societal level. Collective action towards gender equality could be understood as intentional and conscious civic behaviors focused on social transformation, questioning power relations, and promoting gender equality through collective effo...

While much progress has been made towards gender equality, diversity and inclusion in the workplace, education and society, recent years have also revealed continuing challenges that slow or halt this progress. To date, the majority of gender equality action has tended to approach gender equality from one side: being focused on the need to remove b...

People hold different perspectives about how they think the world is changing or should change. We examined five of these “worldviews” about change: Progress, Golden Age, Endless Cycle, Maintenance, and Balance. In Studies 1–4 (total N = 2733) we established reliable measures of each change worldview, and showed how these help explain when people w...

Social role theory posits that binary gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in less egalitarian countries, reflecting these countries’ more pronounced sex-based power divisions. Conversely, evolutionary and self-construal theorists suggest that gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in more egalitarian countries, reflec...

Humans have unlimited wants. This foundational economic principle and widely accepted assumption about human nature poses considerable challenges to addressing sustainability because pursuing wealth and economic growth to meet unlimited wants increases resource use and pollution. Here we show evidence that this principle is not universal, and actua...

A popular form of ‘neoliberal feminism’ promotes women’s resilience as individuals to advance gender equality in leadership and beyond (Rottenberg, 2014). Ostensibly inspiring, this focus can increase beliefs that women, rather than inequitable social structures, are to blame for ongoing inequality (Kim et al., 2018). In this research, we examine a...

Recent findings highlight two facets of the two fundamental stereotype content dimensions of agency (i.e., ‘dominance’ and ‘competence’) and communality (i.e., ‘morality’ and ‘sociability’; e.g., Abele et al., 2016) with implications for understanding gender inequality in the workplace (e.g., Prati et al., 2019). Extending this research and contrib...

Precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action. Here, we present cross-cultural data on a brief measure of precarious manhood beliefs (the Precarious Manhood Beliefs scale [PMB]) that covaries meaningfully with other cross-culturally validated ge...

While it is too late to avert some dangerous consequences of climate change, it is not “all-or-nothing” and our actions can still make a difference. Building on social psychology research showing the importance of seeing one’s group as moral, one reason people act on climate change is to help create a more moral and caring society. Considering clim...

Women, like men, are susceptible to bias when it comes to defending those in their ‘in-group’ from accountability for sexual assault.

More than 40 years of research has shown how women entering traditionally male-dominated occupations, including politics, are disadvantaged by gender biases. Unfortunately, there is less recognition that the nature of these biases has changed over time. This means we’re focused on tackling outdated forms of gender bias, rather than the biases that...

Powerful stereotypes exist about how female rape victims should act. For example, victims are expected to physically resist their attacker and immediately report their assault. In reality, some victims are too shocked to physically resist or too traumatized to immediately go to police. Nevertheless, counterstereotypic-victim behavior can undermine...

Barry recently attributed the non-significant relationship between the cultural dimensions of Individualism (IND) and Masculinity (MASC) to a suppression effect of regional differences. Pairing countries on regional proximity, he showed that a strong correlation between these cultural dimensions emerged. However, we point to significant issues with...

Collective action expresses group-based identities, formed by supporters seeking to further particular social causes. While the development of groups linked to action necessitates interaction among supporters, little research has examined how these groups form. Utilizing responses of supporters who participated in 1 of 29 action-planning sessions,...

Jurors rely on a range of schemas when evaluating allegations of rape and sexual assault. For example, they may be influenced by the prototypicality of the alleged offense, the stereotypicality of the victim, or gender-related stereotypes. These schemas have often been conflated however, making it difficult to determine the unique impact of each on...

The debate over whether sexism continues to plague women politicians has been re-ignited by the rise and fall of Australia's first female prime minister. The deeply offensive sexism directed at Julia Gillard within sections of the media and public have been duly highlighted. However this malicious sexism, while easy to spot, does not account for al...

Two studies investigated the impact of witness demeanour on the extent to which mock jurors were influenced by the strength of the witness’ testimony. The first study (N = 87) manipulated the strength of a witness’ testimony (strong versus weak) and the witness’ non-verbal behaviour (stereotypically deceptive versus non-deceptive). As expected, the...

We identified the active ingredients in people's visions of society's future ("collective futures") that could drive political behavior in the present. In eight studies (N = 595), people imagined society in 2050 where climate change was mitigated (Study 1), abortion laws relaxed (Study 2), marijuana legalized (Study 3), or the power of different re...

A sizeable (and growing) proportion of the public in Western democracies deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change1,2. It is commonly assumed that convincing deniers that climate change is real is necessary for them to act pro-environmentally3,4. However, the likelihood of ‘conversion’ using scientific evidence is limited because these att...

The "think manager-think male" (TMTM) association underlies many gender inequalities in the workplace. However, research into the "glass cliff" has demonstrated that the suitability of male and female managers varies as a function of company performance such that in times of poor performance people may "think female" (Ryan & Haslam, 2005, 2007). Th...

Categorization is the process of understanding things by knowing what other things they are equivalent to and different from. It is a process that is widely studied in cognitive and social psychology and in philosophy and linguistics. This entry offers an overview of categorization and outlines its functions, then describes the major views on categ...

In this article, we argue that progress in the study of collective action rests on an increasingly sophisticated application of the social identity approach. We develop the view, however, that the application of this theoretical perspective has been limited by theoretical and empirical difficulties in distinguishing between social categories and ps...