Salience of gender and sex composition of ad hoc groups: An experimental test of distinctiveness theory.

Abstract

Does the salience of an individual group member's gender depend on the group's sex composition? According to McGuire's distinctiveness theory, even for momentary or ad hoc groups, gender would be more salient in the spontaneous self-concepts of members of the minority sex in mixed-sex groups than in other conditions. To test this prediction experimentally, we manipulated the sex composition of 3-peison groups, which resulted in four types: All male, all female, lone male, and lone female. Within these group contexts, subjects responded to two open-ended probes of spontaneous self-concept (i.e., Tell me what you and Tell me what you are not), with order counterbalanced, and subsequently completed a structured measure of gender identity (Personal Attributes Questionnaire). Chi-square analyses of whether gender was mentioned on the Tell me about yourself probe supported distinctiveness theory. Implications of this finding for distinctiveness theory and the psychology of self are discussed. What factors influence one's self-perception and self-concept? According to McGuire's (1984) distinctiveness theory, a person who takes a complex stimulus such as the self as an object of perception notices her or his distinctive traits and personal characteristics more readily because of their greater informational richness and value for discriminating self from others. Given that distinctive features are supposedly salient to the individual, they should theoretically be mentioned more frequently in one's spontaneous self-description. In tests of this perspective, McGuire and his associates analyzed the content of children's written or oral answers to being asked to tell us about yourself. McGuire emphasized an open-ended approach in order to determine what dimensions are salient to the respondent. A structured measure, on the other hand, presumably compels respondents to define themselves in terms of dimensions chosen by the researcher. The central prediction of distinctiveness theory is that an individual's distinctive traits in relation to other people in a given context will be mentioned more frequently than their more common traits in response to open-ended probes. This prediction has been consistently supported in studies conducted by McGuire and his colleagues over the past decade. For example, testing within classes of sixth-grade students, McGuire and Padawer