Abstract
Gender as a criteria for group membership and prejudicial attribution. This experiment aims at testing whether the fact of belonging to a discriminatory or discriminated group affects the types of explanations given for ambiguous interactions. Fifty-three women (discriminated group) and 65 men (discriminatory group) answered a questionnaire presenting various moderately hostile interactions involving a man towards a woman or towards a person of unknown gender. Each situation was followed by four possible explanations. According to one of the explanations, what happened during the interaction was due to the fact that the protagonist was a woman (explicit prejudice). Another explanation staged stereotypical characteristics of women (implicit prejudice). The other two explanations were fillers. The results support attributional differences between men and women. Whereas men explain their hostile behavior by personal characteristics of women ( implicit prejudice), women attribute the behavior to their group (explicit prejudice). When the gender of the protagonist was unknown, no differences in explicit and implicit prejudices were obtained.
