Sexual or Friendly? Associations About Women, Men, and Self
Using explicit, self-report measures, past research has found that heterosexual men, relative to heterosexual women, often attribute more sexuality to women's behaviors. In the present studies, the Implicit Association Test was used to determine if these findings held at the automatic processing level. The results of Study 1 were consistent with past research: Men, compared to women, had more sexual and less friendly automatic associations with the concept of women. Gender differences, however, were not observed in associations with the concept of self or men. Study 2 investigated how exposure to a dating context affected these associations. Associations about the self became more sexualized after reading about a first date, regardless of the participants' gender. However, for opposite-sex others, men's associations became less sexualized whereas women's associations became more sexualized. Collectively, these studies shed light on chronic and temporarily activated automatic processes relevant to sexual perception and contexts in which women are oversexualized.