Dissertation

Navigating Negativity in the Social World: an Investigation of A) Retaliation Evaluations, B) Misogyny in Comparison to Black Racism, and C) Misogyny Within the Context of Home and Work Dynamics

Stevenson, Catherine Frances

2024

Overview

Though generally deriding harm, people are, nonetheless, forced to navigate a social world in which harm inevitably exists but also where inflicting it can be unavoidable. In three chapters, I explore: 1) The social-relational aspects that affect how retaliation is evaluated; 2) how misogyny—the bigotry that subsists in the context of the world’s most intertwined groups (men and women)—compares to another form of bigotry, black racism; and 3) the dynamics of how men and women—highly dependent on one another in many circumstances—navigate work and home life in the context of misogyny. By exploring how people evaluate retaliation—or the choice not to retaliate—on behalf of self, friend, or stranger in various circumstances, I found that retaliation was favored when open and visible to offender and onlookers and also commensurate with the original offense and condemned when considered surreptitious and harsh. Perhaps as my most compelling results, the more retaliation was endorsed, the higher people rated retaliation for friends (allies) over self- and third-party retaliation. In other words, when people found overall retaliation to be warranted, they rated acting on behalf of a friend higher than the other identities, suggesting that retaliation may be the purview of allies. Conversely, the more overall retaliation was regarded negatively, the greater people regarded abstaining from retaliation for oneself favorably. Such a result suggested that when overall retaliation is condemned, choosing not to retaliate for oneself may be an indication of strength. In Chapter 2, I compared four conditions in which a target, either a white woman, a black man, or a black woman experiences an onslaught of slurs, (along with a control, who was a white man and experiences insults). As predicted, Study 1 demonstrated that people considered 1) racism to be much worse than misogyny across a range of dependent measures, 2) racism to be diluted by the inclusion of misogyny (black-woman condition), and 3) that misogyny serves as something of a “gateway” to other forms of bigotry. In Study 2, I tweaked the language, adding nuance to the original findings. Finally, in Chapter 3, I explored how manipulating worldly prestige, choice, and child-rearing would interact with gender using scenarios describing couples’ work and home-life decisions. I was also interested in how the decisions and positions of a given protagonist’s partner would affect evaluations. Overarchingly, I found that women were praised for making non-normative decisions when they were pressured or coerced into them or when they were framed as supporting an ambitious man. Conversely, men were denigrated for taking on child-caring or “lesser” job positions but especially when paired with a partner who had a powerful, lucrative career.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Behavioral psychology / Cognitive psychology / Neurosciences
• ISBN: 9798381943733