Gender Beliefs, Norms & Stereotypes
Stereotypes are consensual, generic beliefs that overemphasize differences between social groups and downplay variations within them. In the case of gender, stereotypes are both descriptive (i.e., beliefs about what women and men are typically like) and prescriptive (i.e., beliefs about what women and men should and should not be like). Both descriptive and prescriptive stereotypes play an important role in people’s choices, encouraging them to self-select into gender-stereotypic roles. These stereotypes can
also feed into prejudicial views about the appropriate roles of men and women, and represent barriers that block individuals’ entry into counter-stereotypic roles. At SRBL, we investigate gender beliefs, norms, and stereotypes to understand their cultural transmission (e.g., through media and socialization), how they influence individuals’ self-views and choices, how they shape the way that people evaluate and treat others, and how they can be effectively challenged.
For example, we recently examined subtle linguistic patterns that convey gender stereotypes in a large corpus of children’s television scripts spanning five decades (Vial et al., 2025). The distinctive contribution of this research lies in uncovering a persistent syntactic gender bias whereby male words in our corpus were more likely than female words to be used as the grammatical agent (vs. the patient) in a sentence. This persistent syntactic gender bias communicates to children traditional gender ideologies about men being the active “doers” in society, contributing to the intergenerational transmission of gender stereotypes.
Vial, A. C., Davani, A. M., Zuo, R., Havaldar, S., Chestnut, E., Dehghani, M., & Cimpian, A. (2026). Syntactic and semantic gender biases in the language on children’s television: Evidence from 98 shows from 1960 to 2018. (7), 574-588. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976251349815. PDF.
In another investigation of the cultural manifestation of gender stereotypes, we employed visual content analysis to examine publicity materials from movies produced in the United States and countries in the Middle East and North African region (Mi et al., 2026). We found that the postures and portrayals of men’s and women’s bodies signal their differential power in multiple ways, and these patterns are remarkably persistent and similar across regions. These insights contribute to growing efforts in psychology to examine gender norms cross-culturally and extend limited knowledge of gender stereotypes in MENA, specifically.
Mi, C., Diab, M., Nie, J., & Vial, A. C. (2026). A decade of gender representations in American and Arabic movie posters. Manuscript in revision.
Other SRBL publications on gender beliefs, norms, and stereotypes:
#Stanaland, A., #Vial, A. C., & Cimpian, A. (2026). Falling in line: Children’s gender conformity after feedback signaling gender atypicality. Advance online publication. Developmental Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0002166 (#Joint first authorship). PDF.
Spielmann, J. & Vial, A. C. (2025). Unstable, indistinct, and cohesive? How group cognitions shape attitudes toward transgender and nonbinary people as a function of gender essentialism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000501. PDF.
Vial, A. C. & Spielmann, J. (2025). The social psychology of gender: From basic cognition to broad social structure. In Stern, C. (Ed.), (pp. 262-278) Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN: 978-1035310654. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035310661.00024. PDF.
Vial, A. C., & Cimpian, A. (2020). Evaluative feedback expresses and reinforces cultural stereotypes. In E. Brummelman (Ed.), Psychological Perspectives on Praise. New York: Routledge. PDF.
Kahalon, R., Bareket, O., Vial, A. C., Sassenhagen, N., Becker, J. C., & Shnabel, N. (2019). The Madonna-Whore Dichotomy predicts patriarchy endorsement: Evidence from Israel, Germany, and the United States. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 43(3), 348-367. https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684319843298. PDF.