Dominant Men, Warm Women: Disentangling the Activation and Application of Gender Stereotypes

ABSTRACT

Although gender stereotypes are known to influence social judgments, the cognitive processes through which they influence impression formation remain poorly understood. Across two pre‐registered experiments, we adapted the stereotype misperception task (SMT) to simultaneously estimate and disentangle stereotype activation and application using multinomial modelling. Participants formed impressions of ambiguous drawings in terms of dominance (Experiment 1, N  = 130) or warmth (Experiment 2, N  = 136) after being primed with photographs depicting men, women or neutral stimuli. Male primes elicited more dominance judgments, whereas female primes elicited warmer judgments. Both stereotype activation and application systematically contributed to stereotype‐congruent responses, supporting their empirical distinction. Contrary to the original SMT proposal, stereotype activation and application influenced judgments only when the target trait level was not readily detected. Together, these findings extend the SMT to the study of gender stereotypes and provide a process‐based framework for investigating how they shape impression formation.