Abstract
Williams and Sommer found that ostracized women, but not men, worked harder on a subsequent collective task, speculating that women’s social compensation was motivated by threatened belongingness. The present 2 × 3 design with 180 U.S. women and men replicated this gender gap in work contributions then closed it using two status-manipulations that favored women’s task abilities or the higher education of undergraduates with high school partners. Additional analyses identified three clusters of participants who failed to compensate: only men in the replication control, women scoring low in self-monitoring, and participants who persisted unsuccessfully to resist exclusion. These patterns shift our focus away from gender and threatened belongingness toward control and status as explanations for the original gender difference.
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The authors thank Kipling Williams and Kristin Sommer for sharing their materials including the cyberball game; Mark Snyder for permission to use the self-monitoring scale; and Arnie Kahn for his supportive and helpful comments. We also appreciate the invaluable help of John Bean, Jessica Christopher, John Haller, David Monter, Pamela Ruesch, and Angela Saniat who, like the first author, served as experimenters throughout data collection.
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Bozin, M.A., Yoder, J.D. Social Status, Not Gender Alone, Is Implicated in Different Reactions By Women and Men to Social Ostracism. Sex Roles 58, 713–720 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-007-9383-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-007-9383-1