Gender stereotypes across the ages: On-line processing in school-age children, young and older adults

Most of the research on implicit gender stereotyping to date has been conducted with one age group – young adults. The mechanisms that underlie on-line processing of stereotypical information in other age groups have received much less attention. This is the first study to simultaneously investigate real time processing of gender stereotypes at different age levels. We investigated the activation of gender stereotypes in Italian in four groups of participants: third- and fifth- graders, young and older adults. Participants heard a role noun associated with masculine stereotypical (preside “headmaster”) or feminine stereotypical (badante “social care worker”) gender followed by a male (padre “father”) or female kinship term (madre “mother”). The task was to decide if the two words – the role noun and kinship term – could describe the same person. Across all age groups, participants were significantly faster to respond, and were more likely to press ‘yes’, when the target was preceded by a stereotypically congruent than incongruent prime. These findings suggest that information about the stereotypical gender associated with a role noun is incorporated into the mental representation of this word and is activated as soon as the word is heard.