13:50 - 15:30
Location: 223 - Floor 1
Chair/s:
Lorena Pérez Alfonso
Lorena Perez-Alonso - Genderless Leadership: A Behavioral Study with College Students
Mirco Tonin - Gender Differences in Pension Investment: The Role of Biased Advice
Merav Weiss-Sidi - Visual Cues and Behavioral Intentions: A Mixed-Methods Study on Color, Gender, and Consumer Inspiration in the Tech Sector.
Henry Dambanemuya - What Others Think: An Experimental Study on Gender Norm Perception
Patrycja Janowska-Widomska - Gender Effects in Peer Nominations for Academic Research Funding
Submission 190
What Others Think: An Experimental Study on Gender Norm Perception
panel.2-223 - Floor 1-04
Presented by: Henry Dambanemuya
Jiangyuan LinZhian ChenHenry Dambanemuya
University of Chicago
People systematically misperceive social norms, overestimating peer support for inequitable beliefs. While correcting these misperceptions can catalyze social change, the mechanisms by which social learning facilitates belief revision remain poorly understood. In a preregistered experiment (N=903), U.S. participants estimated peer agreement with 12 gender norm statements across six domains, then received social information attributed to different sources: majority opinion (conformity cues), adults over 40 (age cues), highly educated individuals (prestige cues), or an arbitrary source (seasonal preference cues). All treatment conditions received identical social reference information derived from pilot data; only source attribution varied. We found that participants substantially overestimated peer support for inequitable norms (M=22.7 percentage points). Exposure to social information produced large reductions in misperception across all treatment conditions relative to control (Cohen's d = 0.42 -- 1.52), but effectiveness varied significantly by attributed source. Age and conformity cues produced the largest corrections (d=1.52, 1.48), significantly outperforming prestige cues (d=1.14) and arbitrary cues (d=1.16). These findings reveal that source attribution substantially moderates the effectiveness of norm correction interventions, even when informational content is identical, and suggest that prestige cues may be less effective for moral norm correction than for factual domains.