Women exaggerate, men downplay: Gendered endorsement of emotional dramatization stereotypes contributes to gender bias in pain expectations.

ABSTRACT: The current work tested whether perceivers believe that women, relative to men, are likely to exaggerate versus downplay pain, an effect we refer to as the gender-pain exaggeration bias. The gender-pain exaggeration bias was operationalized as the extent to which perceivers believe women, relative to men, claim more pain than they feel. Across four experiments, we found that women were expected to exaggerate pain more than men and men were expected to downplay pain more than women (Studies 1-4). Further, judgments that women were more emotionally dramatizing than men contributed to this gender-pain exaggeration bias (Studies 2 and 4). We also assessed whether perceiver-level differences in endorsement of gendered emotional dramatization stereotypes (Studies 3-4) moderated this gender-pain

SUBMITTER: Paganini GA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10688448 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature