Then make it up. Pretend to want something awfully, then cry off for her sake. Flatters them. She must have been thinking of someone else all the time.
Most American bookstores stock a plurality of titles on sex differences. One popular series explains (figuratively) that men are from Mars, women from Venus, and that understanding these differences can demystify and provide behavioral guidelines on a date, in the bedroom, while raising children and, after things fall apart, when starting over following a breakup. Among other things, such popular books reflect and reinforce popular stereotypes that women are more emotional than men, particularly regarding sadness. Scientific evidence, in contrast, makes quite clear that the sexes are more similar than different in emotional experience, suggesting that stereotypes generally overstate emotional sex differences.
The contrast between popular stereotypes about emotional sex differences versus scientific demonstrations of those sex differences naturally raises the question: Why don’t people’s personal emotional experiences dissuade beliefs in stereotypic sex differences? If women and men don’t experience emotions of different intensity, why do they believe that they do? We think that one reason is that stereotypes can influence people’s memory of their own emotions, which consequently reinforce stereotypic sex differences. We hypothesize, specifically, that stereotypes influence memory of emotion such that people recall their own emotions more stereotypically when the relative accessibility of those stereotypes is high. Procedures that increase stereo- types’ relative accessibility, such as cognitive load and priming, should therefore increase stereotypic sex differences in emotion memory.
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The results of three experiments provide evidence that the relative accessibility of stereotypes about sex difference influences people’s memory of very recent emotions.
photo { Francesco Nazardo }
