RESEARCH ARTICLE
On the Context Sensitivity of the Sexual Attribution Bias: A Replication and Extension to Situations of Failure
Maria Agthe1, *, Matthias Spörrle2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2009Volume: 2
First Page: 19
Last Page: 24
Publisher ID: TOPSYJ-2-19
DOI: 10.2174/1874350100902010019
Article History:
Received Date: 06/11/2008Revision Received Date: 13/03/2009
Acceptance Date: 19/03/2009
Electronic publication date: 20/4/2009
Collection year: 2009
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
According to the “Sexual Attribution Bias” (SAB), young adults attribute successful outcomes of same-aged, same-sex attractive stimulus persons in a more derogative way than the success of less attractive persons, whereas this pattern reverses for the opposite sex. Based on assumptions derived from theories of social comparison, one could argue that the success of the stimulus person (which had been present in all previous SAB research) might be a necessary precondition for the emergence of the SAB. By contrast, we hypothesized that – given the evolutionary grounding of the glorifying and devaluing tendencies towards other persons – the bias will also emerge in scenarios of failure of the stimulus person. Two studies using the same stimulus persons and the same scenario tested this assumption: Study 1 replicated the SAB response pattern within a success version of the scenario and Study 2 confirmed the bias when using a failure version of the same scenario. A comparison of the effect sizes of the two studies indicated that the success of the stimulus person increased the response pattern’s strength, but was not mandatory for its formation. Thus, the SAB reveals to be sensitive to, but not coercively dependent on context variables, thereby underpinning the assumption of an evolutionarily grounding of the bias.
