Women and African Americans-groups targeted by negative stereotypes about their intellectual abilities-may be underrepresented in careers that prize brilliance and genius. A recent nationwide survey ...of academics provided initial support for this possibility. Fields whose practitioners believed that natural talent is crucial for success had fewer female and African American PhDs. The present study seeks to replicate this initial finding with a different, and arguably more naturalistic, measure of the extent to which brilliance and genius are prized within a field. Specifically, we measured field-by-field variability in the emphasis on these intellectual qualities by tallying-with the use of a recently released online tool-the frequency of the words "brilliant" and "genius" in over 14 million reviews on RateMyProfessors.com, a popular website where students can write anonymous evaluations of their instructors. This simple word count predicted both women's and African Americans' representation across the academic spectrum. That is, we found that fields in which the words "brilliant" and "genius" were used more frequently on RateMyProfessors.com also had fewer female and African American PhDs. Looking at an earlier stage in students' educational careers, we found that brilliance-focused fields also had fewer women and African Americans obtaining bachelor's degrees. These relationships held even when accounting for field-specific averages on standardized mathematics assessments, as well as several competing hypotheses concerning group differences in representation. The fact that this naturalistic measure of a field's focus on brilliance predicted the magnitude of its gender and race gaps speaks to the tight link between ability beliefs and diversity.
Past research has explored children's gender stereotypes about specific intellectual domains, such as mathematics and science, but less is known about the acquisition of domain‐general stereotypes ...about the intellectual abilities of women and men. During 2017 and 2018, the authors administered Implicit Association Tests to Chinese Singaporean adults and 8‐ to 12‐year‐olds (N = 731; 58% female) to examine the gender stereotype that portrays exceptional intellectual ability (e.g., genius, brilliance) as a male attribute. This gender‐brilliance stereotype was present among adults and children and for both Chinese and White stereotype targets. It also was stronger among older children and among children whose parents also showed it. This early‐emerging stereotype may be an obstacle to gender equity in many prestigious employment sectors.
Women are underrepresented in careers where success is perceived to depend on high levels of intellectual ability (e.g., brilliance, genius), including those in science and technology. This ...phenomenon may be due in part to a gender-brilliance stereotype that portrays men as more brilliant than women. Here, we offer the first investigation of whether people implicitly associate brilliance with men more than women. Implicit measures are absent from prior research on the gender-brilliance stereotype, despite having the potential to contribute unique information about the prevalence of this stereotype. Across 5 studies (N = 3618) with 17 Implicit Association Tests using 6 distinct comparison traits (e.g., creative, funny), we found consistent evidence for an implicit gender-brilliance stereotype favoring men. Indeed, for 5 out of 6 comparison traits (even the male-typed trait funny), male was associated with brilliant and female with the comparison trait. Only a physical trait (strong) showed a stronger association with male than brilliant did; none of the psychological traits used as comparisons rivaled brilliant in their association to male. Evidence for the implicit gender-brilliance stereotype was consistently observed whether the male and female targets were represented with verbal labels or pictures, and whether the pictures depicted White or Black targets. Moreover, the results were robust in both men and women, children and adults, across different regions of the U.S. as well as internationally. This pervasive implicit association of brilliance with men is likely to hold women back in careers perceived to require brilliance.
•Women are underrepresented in careers where brilliance is valued.•A stereotype associating brilliance with men may be part of the reason.•We conducted the first investigation of this stereotype with implicit measures.•Implicit Association Tests (IATs) revealed a robust male-brilliant association.•This association was observed across a range of stimuli, cultures, and ages.
This crowdsourced project introduces a collaborative approach to improving the reproducibility of scientific research, in which findings are replicated in qualified independent laboratories before ...(rather than after) they are published. Our goal is to establish a non-adversarial replication process with highly informative final results. To illustrate the Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) approach, 25 research groups conducted replications of all ten moral judgment effects which the last author and his collaborators had “in the pipeline” as of August 2014. Six findings replicated according to all replication criteria, one finding replicated but with a significantly smaller effect size than the original, one finding replicated consistently in the original culture but not outside of it, and two findings failed to find support. In total, 40% of the original findings failed at least one major replication criterion. Potential ways to implement and incentivize pre-publication independent replication on a large scale are discussed.
Interpreting a failure to replicate is complicated by the fact that the failure could be due to the original finding being a false positive, unrecognized moderating influences between the original ...and replication procedures, or faulty implementation of the procedures in the replication. One strategy to maximize replication quality is involving the original authors in study design. We (N = 17 Labs and N = 1,550 participants, after exclusions) experimentally tested whether original author involvement improved replicability of a classic finding from Terror Management Theory (Greenberg et al., 1994). Our results were non-diagnostic of whether original author involvement improves replicability because we were unable to replicate the finding under any conditions. This suggests that the original finding was either a false positive or the conditions necessary to obtain it are not fully understood or no longer exist. Data, materials, analysis code, preregistration, and supplementary documents can be found on the OSF page: https://osf.io/8ccnw/
In Experiment 5 of Albarracín et al. (2008), participants primed with words associated with action performed better on a subsequent cognitive task than did participants primed with words associated ...with inaction. A direct replication attempt by Frank, Kim, and Lee (2016) as part of the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P) failed to find evidence for this effect. In this article, we discuss several potential explanations for these discrepant findings: the source of participants (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk vs. traditional undergraduate-student pool), the setting of participation (online vs. in lab), and the possible moderating role of affect. We tested Albarracín et al.’s original hypothesis in two new samples: For the first sample, we followed the protocol developed by Frank et al. and recruited participants via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (n = 580). For the second sample, we used a revised protocol incorporating feedback from the original authors and recruited participants from eight universities (n = 884). We did not detect moderation by protocol; patterns in the revised protocol resembled those in our implementation of the RP:P protocol, but the estimate of the focal effect size was smaller than that found originally by Albarracín et al. and larger than that found in Frank et al.’s replication attempt. We discuss these findings and possible explanations.
We present the data from a crowdsourced project seeking to replicate findings in independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. In this Pre-Publication Independent ...Replication (PPIR) initiative, 25 research groups attempted to replicate 10 moral judgment effects from a single laboratory's research pipeline of unpublished findings. The 10 effects were investigated using online/lab surveys containing psychological manipulations (vignettes) followed by questionnaires. Results revealed a mix of reliable, unreliable, and culturally moderated findings. Unlike any previous replication project, this dataset includes the data from not only the replications but also from the original studies, creating a unique corpus that researchers can use to better understand reproducibility and irreproducibility in science.
Photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting represents a promising route for renewable production of hydrogen, but trade-offs between photoelectrode stability and efficiency have greatly limited the ...performance of PEC devices. In this work, we employ a metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) photoelectrode architecture that allows for stable and efficient water splitting using narrow bandgap semiconductors. Substantial improvement in the performance of Si-based MIS photocathodes is demonstrated through a combination of a high-quality thermal SiO2 layer and the use of bilayer metal catalysts. Scanning probe techniques were used to simultaneously map the photovoltaic and catalytic properties of the MIS surface and reveal the spillover-assisted evolution of hydrogen off the SiO2 surface and lateral photovoltage driven minority carrier transport over distances that can exceed 2 cm. The latter finding is explained by the photo- and electrolyte-induced formation of an inversion channel immediately beneath the SiO2/Si interface. These findings have important implications for further development of MIS photoelectrodes and offer the possibility of highly efficient PEC water splitting.
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