Gender-Role Attitudes 93than an emotional male hair stylist. What
would have to happen for us to view the tradi-
tionally masculine occupations, such as lawyer
and doctor, as acceptable for women? We will
be more convinced by a female doctor who
is married and has a family than by a single
female doctor with no family in the area. We
are more likely to view disconfirming behav-
ior as acceptable if it is displayed by someone
who otherwise fits the gender-role stereotype.
There is some evidence that exposure
to counterstereotypes can affect our think-
ing. When college women were exposed to
positive, negative, or no stereotypes about
feminists, twice as many women in the posi-
tive stereotype condition as the other two
conditions identified themselves as feminists
(Roy, Weibust, & Miller, 2007).
Sometimes, we do not have to alter our
stereotype because a target person calls to
mind more than one stereotype; then, we can
choose which stereotype to invoke. When
thinking of Ellen DeGeneres, do you apply the
category “lesbian” or “comedian”? People who
like DeGeneres, but have a negative stereotype
of lesbians, recall the stereotype of successful
comedian. For those people, she does not rep-
resent a disconfirming instance of the stereo-
type of lesbians; instead, she is an example of
the stereotype for “successful comedian.”Do Stereotypes Reflect Reality?
Stereotypes reflect society’s beliefs about the
features that men and women possess, about
which there is widespread agreement. But
do stereotypes reflect reality? Gender-role
stereotypes are an exaggeration in that they
do not take into consideration any overlap
between women and men. It is certainly not
the case that all men are independent and
all women are emotional. Some women are
more independent than the average man,that reflects the trait is clear rather than ambig-
uous (Rothbart & John, 1985). For example, it
would be easier to disconfirm the stereotype
that a woman is talkative rather than the ste-
reotype that a woman is emotional, because it
is easier to observe talking or not talking than
emotionality. It is also easier to disconfirm
positive traits than negative traits (Rothbart &
John, 1985). Thus your favorable impressions
of people are more easily changed than your
unfavorable impressions; it is easier to change
people’s beliefs that a woman is kind than to
change people’s beliefs that a woman nags.
Rothbart and John (1985) remark, “Favorable
traits are difficult to acquire but easy to lose,
whereas unfavorable traits are easy to acquire
but difficult to lose” (p. 85).
The prototype approach has been ap-
plied to stereotyping to understand how ste-
reotypes can be altered (Rothbart & John,
1985). The likelihood of a target being associ-
ated with a category depends on how well the
target fits the category overall. When faced
with a target person, we try to find the clos-
est match between the target person’s features
and the features of a specific category, or ste-
reotype. How good the match is depends on
how prototypical, or how good an example,
the target is of the category. Disconfirmation
of a feature of a stereotype is more likely to
occur if the target person otherwise closely
matches the category. That is, we are more
likely to change a feature of a stereotype if the
disconfirming behavior is in the context of
other behavior that fits the stereotype. Let’s
take an example. The feature “not emotional”
is part of the male stereotype. How might we
decide that being emotional is acceptable for
men? We will be more persuaded by an emo-
tional male who watches football than by an
emotional male who reads poetry; similarly,
we will be more persuaded by a successful
competitive businessman who is emotionalM03_HELG0185_04_SE_C03.indd 93 6/21/11 12:22 PM