ATTITUDES AND SOCIAL COGNITION Stereotypes and Standards of Judgment

People routinely adjust their subjective judgment standards as they evaluate members of stereotyped social groups. Such shifts are less likely to occur, however, when judgments are made on stable, "objective" response scales. In 3 studies, subjects judged a series of targets with respect to a number of gender-relevant attributes (e.g.t height, weight, and income), using either subjective (Likert-type) or objective response scales (e.g., inches, pounds, and dollars). Objective judgments were consistently influenced by sex stereotypes; subjective judgments were not. Results were also consistent with the expectation that when a judgment attribute is unrelated to gender, male and female targets evoke the same judgment standards. A schematic model of how stereotyped mental representations are expressed on subjectively defined rating scales is presented, and implications for the study of person perception are discussed.