Keynote Lectures
9. September, 10:00 Uhr, ESA 1, Hörsaal M
Prof. Dr. Dominique Muller (University of Grenoble Alpes):
“Subliminal priming in social psychology: To be or not to be subliminal, that is the question.”
Social psychologists often want to argue that the processes they are studying do not require consciousness. As a first illustration, I will present our recent studies notably showing that one’s first name captures attention unconsciously (Alexopoulos, Muller, Ric, & Marendaz, 2012). As a second illustration, I will present another line of research where we showed that people can do additions without knowing they do and without seeing consciously the digits they are adding (Ric & Muller, 2012). While presenting these studies, I will discuss how we tried to ensure that those effects were indeed unconscious. By doing so, I will show, using our studies, how these tests can be more or less stringent. Extending this discussion, I will present a literature review on how we, as social psychologists, ensure that the processes we are studying really are unconscious. This will enable to point out the strengths and weaknesses of the tests we rely on for that purpose and how these tests convincingly allow arguing that our processes are indeed subliminal.
9. September, 17:00 Uhr, ESA 1, Hörsaal M
Prof. Dr. Julia Becker (Osnabrück University):
“The Benefits and The Burdens Of Benevolence”
At first glance, benevolent sexist behaviors seem to be beneficial for women. In this talk, I present results of different studies showing that benevolent sexist behaviors are not particularly flattering. Moreover, I present a series of studies asking why men engage in benevolent sexist behaviors in first place. In these studies, we tested its positive and negative implications of benevolent sexist behavior from a men’s perspective. Results show that benevolent behavior can be rewarding for men by increasing positive emotions, self-esteem and feelings of masculinity and attractiveness. However, results also show potential burdens of engaging in BS behavior: Men perceived women as being less competent and were less willing to engage in collective action for more gender equality. Implications of these findings are discussed.
10. September, 10:00 Uhr, ESA 1, Hörsaal M
Prof. Dr. Anne Maass (University of Padova):
“The case of auditory gaydar”
It is a widespread urban myth that people are able to detect other people’s sexual orientation from vocal information alone (auditory gaydar). I will argue that auditory gaydar, although often inaccurate, leads to stereotyping, avoidance and discrimination of gay/lesbian-sounding speakers. Just like “social vision”, voice-based inferences seem to be driven by two distinct processes, a direct feature-based path and an indirect path mediated by categorization. Together, recent research on auditory gaydar confirms the idea that voice contains considerable (and generally underestimated) social information that drives inferences in a largely automatic fashion.
11. September, 10:30 Uhr, ESA 1, Hörsaal M
Prof. Dr. Roland Imhoff (Mainz University):
“The ABC of Stereotypes - a data-driven approach to dimensions of stereotype content”
It is almost a trueism that the two most fundamental dimensions on which we judge and compare individuals and social groups refer to the expected benevolence and kindness (warmth or communion) and their estimated ability and assertiveness (agency or competence). Despite the wide-spread reliance on these two presumably orthogonal dimensions, evidence for the claim that they are indeed most fundamental is scarce. In the present talk I will use this example of stereotype content to exemplify the downfalls of an exclusively top-down research process in which participants are constrained to give a rating on dimensions the researcher previously chose for them. As an alternative, I will present a data-driven approach that not only allowed the identification of two different fundamental dimensions that people employ spontaneously (high vs. low agency/ socioeconomic status; conservative vs. progressive beliefs) but also enabled a fresh look at the relation between warmth/ communion and other pre-evaluative dimensions. The implications of this model will be spelled out in showing the perceived relevance of a group's position on the beliefs dimension for its exploration vs. exploitation behavior as well as a general curvilinear relation between agency and communion in the perception of groups, individuals and animal species.