Premium
Gender and beliefs about memory
Author(s) -
Crawford Mary,
Herrmann Douglas J.,
Holdsworth Michelle J.,
Randall Emily P.,
Robbins Diana
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1989.tb02329.x
Subject(s) - psychology , homogeneous , social psychology , developmental psychology , function (biology) , sample (material) , memoria , cognitive psychology , cognition , chemistry , physics , chromatography , evolutionary biology , neuroscience , biology , thermodynamics
Beliefs about subjects’ own memory performances and about the memory performances of others were studied as a function of gender in two experiments. Both experiments used adaptations of the Inventory of Memory Experiences (IME) that employed somewhat different response scales. The first experiment used a small sample, heterogeneous with respect to age; the second used a large homogeneous sample of college students. In both experiments, gender was strongly related to beliefs about others’ memory performance and weakly related to beliefs about one's own performance. Female and male subjects agreed that men are better at some tasks (e.g. directions) and women are better at others (e.g. shopping lists), but showed no consistent tendency to view themselves in terms of the beliefs they held about others of their gender. These results imply that behaviours based on beliefs about the memory performance of women and men may be gender biased when directed towards others.