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The Transmission of Gender Stereotypes Through Televised
Patterns of Nonverbal Bias
Sarah Ariel Lamer
1
, Paige Dvorak
2
, Ashley M. Biddle
3
, Kristin Pauker
4
, and Max Weisbuch
2
1
Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
2
Department of Psychology, University of Denver
3
Department of Psychology, Leeward Community College, University of Hawai‘i
4
Department of Psychology, University of Hawai‘iatMa¯noa
One tacit assumption in social psychology is that people learn gender stereotypes from their environments.
Yet, little research has examined how such learning might occur: What are the features of social
environments that shape people’s gender stereotypes? We propose that nonverbal patterns communicate
intersubjective gender norms (i.e., what behaviors people value in women and girls vs. men and boys).
Furthermore, we propose that children develop intersubjective gender norms in part because they are
commonly and consistently exposed to these nonverbal patterns. Across three studies, we tested the
hypotheses that (a) children are frequently exposed to a nonverbal pattern of gender-role bias in which
people respond more positively to gender-stereotypical than counterstereotypical girls and boys and
(b) emotionally perceptive girls extract meaning from this pattern about what behaviors others value in
girls (traditionally feminine behavior) and boys (traditionally masculine behavior). Study 1 indicated that
characters across 12 popular U.S. children’s TV programs exhibited a small, but consistent nonverbal bias
favoring gender-stereotypical TV characters. In Study 2, girls (N=68; 6–10 years) felt more pressure to be
feminine after viewing TV clips that included traditional nonverbal bias than after viewing clips that
reversed this bias. As predicted, these results held only to the extent that children could accurately decode
nonverbal emotion (i.e., were emotionally perceptive). Study 3 replicated these results (N=91; 6–11 years).
Keywords: gender stereotyping, socialization, nonverbal behavior, social development,
intersubjective norms
Supplemental materials: https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000390.supp
People around the world expect girls and women to have different
characteristics than boys and men, and scientists often trace differ-
ential treatment to these expectations. Accordingly, there now exist
volumes of research describing the antecedents and consequences of
gender roles: consensual expectations for the behaviors and char-
acteristics of boys and men versus girls and women (Bussey &
Bandura, 1984;Eagly & Steffen, 1984;Halim et al., 2017;Hoyt
et al., 2009;Lamer & Weisbuch, 2019;Plant et al., 2000). Gender
roles may thus be regarded as culturally shared knowledge about
how girls and boys are expected to behave. Psychologists have
focused on how these gender roles impact how individuals think and
behave. Such social influence assumes that people learn what other
people expect from girls versus boys, not just what they themselves
expect from girls versus boys. Furthermore, people think and behave
in a manner consistent with their consensual expectations, not just
their individual expectations. Yet when scientists have examined
children’s and adults’beliefs about gender roles, they have often
focused on personal endorsement—rather than knowledge—of those
gender roles. In this article, we focus our efforts on identifying the
antecedents and consequences of gender-role knowledge. In particu-
lar, we focus on one kind of gender-role knowledge: intersubjective
norms, or beliefs about what other people believe and value.
A burgeoning literature in cultural psychology suggests that
intersubjective norms uniquely predict individual’s behavior, over
and above those individuals’personal beliefs or values (Chiu et al.,
2010;Shteynberg et al., 2009;Zou et al., 2009). In fact, the influence
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This article was published Online First February 21, 2022.
Sarah Ariel Lamer https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3597-0958
Paige Dvorak https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6556-8770
Ashley M. Biddle https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3756-2755
Kristin Pauker https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0848-5159
Max Weisbuch https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6463-4692
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate
Research Fellowship Program (DGE-1104602) and the APA Division 35 Geis
Memorial Award. All publicly available codes, materials, and preregistrations
can be found here: https://osf.io/yj62x/ (Lamer et al., 2021).
Sarah Ariel Lamer played the lead role in conceptualization, data curation,
formal analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, project
administration, resources, supervision, visualization, writing of original draft,
and writing of review and editing. Paige Dvorak played a supporting role in
methodology, project administration, resources, and supervision. Ashley M.
Biddle played a supporting role in data curation and supervision. Kristin Pauker
played a supporting role in conceptualization, supervision, and writing of
review and editing. Max Weisbuch played a supporting role in conceptualiza-
tion, data curation, formal analysis, funding acquisition, methodology, re-
sources, supervision, writing of original draft, and writing of review and editing.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sarah
Ariel Lamer, Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Knox-
ville, Austin Peay Building, Knoxville, TN 37996, United States. Email:
slamer@utk.edu
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:
Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes
© 2022 American Psychological Association 2022, Vol. 123, No. 6, 1315–1335
ISSN: 0022-3514 https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000390
1315