Gender Differences in Impression Formation

Abstract

This paper aims to highlight the differences between men and women regarding impressionformation. It is based on secondary analysis of the data gathered in two previous experiments withsimilar conditions. However, the hypotheses formulated within this study have not been testedbefore. The current analysis was conducted on 86 participants, 47 males and 39 females. Their agesranged between 15 and 32, as they were either high school or university students engaged in amaster’s program. Their task consisted of watching a 14 seconds long video of a female confederatereading a neutral text and then evaluating her using a semantic differential with four dimensions:sociability, ethics, power and activity. Based on previous studies, it was hypothesized that men andwomen will form different first impressions of the actor employed in the movie. More precisely, themajority of the studies undertaken in this area compare men and women’s accuracy scores of facialexpressions decoding, yielding mostly significant differences, with women achieving higheraccuracy. A small percentage has addressed other aspects of social perception like: personality traitsor socio-demographic characteristics, yielding similar results. However, the current experimentfailed to reveal any differences between men’s and women’s evaluations. Accuracy assessmentswere disregarded in this study, since establishing unequivocal criteria for personality traitsevaluation is yet to be achieved. The results are consistent with a small percentage of the studiesconducted on gender differences in social perception and allow multiple interpretations.

Keywords

• Gender differences
• Impression formation
• Social perception
• Nonverbal behavior
• Semantic differential