Self‐gender schemata and the processing of social information

Previous research has found that subjects possessing a self‐gender schema in line with gender stereotypes (i.e. sex‐typed individuals) are quicker than non‐sex‐typed subjects in deciding whether a stereotypically masculine or feminine trait adjective is self‐descriptive or not. The results of memory tasks are more contradictory. In this study we have supposed that gender‐schematic subjects can most effectively process gender‐linked information even if it does not relate to the self. More specifically, we hypothesized (a) that sex‐typed subjects are quicker than non‐sex‐typed subjects in deciding whether a trait adjective can be better attributed to men or women and (b) that they recall a greater number of masculine and feminine adjectives and have greater gender‐based clustering indices compared with non‐sex‐typed individuals. Subjects previously identified as Sex‐typed, Androgynous, Indifferentiated, and Cross‐sex‐typed were presented with adjectives referring to stereotypic masculine...