Sex, cheating, and disgust: Enhanced source memory for trait information that violates gender stereotypes

Abstract

The present study examines memory for social-exchange-relevant information. In Experiment 1 male and female faces were shown together with behaviour descriptions of cheating, altruistic, and neutral behaviour. Previous results have led to the hypothesis that people preferentially remember schema-atypical information. Given the common gender stereotype that women are kinder and less egoistic than men, this atypicality account would predict that source memory (that is, memory for the type of context to which a face was associated) should be enhanced for female cheaters in comparison to male cheaters. The results of Experiment 1 confirmed this hypothesis. Experiment 2 reveals that source memory for female faces associated with disgusting behaviours is enhanced in comparison to male faces associated with disgusting behaviours. Thus the atypicality effect generalises beyond social-exchange-relevant information, a result which is inconsistent with the assumption that the findings can be ascribed to a highly specific cheater detection module.