Effects of sexism and self-construal on women's mental intrusion and autobiographical memory

Abstract

This online experiment aims to examine self-construal as a moderator to prevent negative effect, namely, mental intrusions and autobiographical memory about being incompetent, from hostile and benevolent sexism. Thai female undergraduates (N = 89) aged between 18 to 24 (M = 20.30, SD = 1.30) were recruited through convenience sampling technique. Participants were randomly assigned to either benevolent sexism or hostile sexism condition followed by one of the three self-construal written task (independent, interdependent, or no self-construal conditions). Participants completed a set of short-term memory question in order to assessed their mental intrusions during the time completing the task and were asked to recall about the time they felt incompetent and listed it out.

A Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was conducted to examine the influence of sexism (hostile vs. benevolent) and self-construal (interdependent vs. independent VS. no self-construal) on female mental intrusions and autobiographical memory, the interaction effect was significant for autobiographical memory, (F(2, 83) = 3.38, p < .05), but not mental intrusions (F(2, 83) = 1.06, p = .351). However, self-construal manipulation was only help reduce mental intrusions and autobiographical memory about being incompetent in the hostile sexism but not the benevolent sexism. The best self-construal treatment for the hostile sexism condition was interdependent self-construal as participants in this group scored highest in short-term memory task (M = 26.61, SD = 5.58), reported lowest mental intrusions (M = 3.22, SD = 1.40) and autobiographical memory (M = 7.56, SD = 4.39). It could imply that hostile sexism directly attacks female and interdependent self-construal motivated them to complete the task for their gender group. While benevolent sexism seems to work best with control task of self-construal because their performance were better (M = 25.42, SD = 4.18) and level of mental intrusions (M = 3.17, SD = 0.73) and autobiographical memory (M = 8.69, SD = 5.27) were lower than other conditions. The outcomes suggested that control task might help participants to focus on unrelated topics instead of ambiguous benevolent sexism text.