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one might suspect that demand characteristics account for the findings, if not entirely so, as
answering clearly gender-biased questions with an opposite-sex character representing
themselves on the computer screen likely made the participants more “gender-conscious” than
they normally would do. Several factors seem to render this account less compelling. First, the
question category and the characters were ostensibly selected by the participants themselves. In
fact, quite a few participants asked if they could re-select the character when the opposite-sex
character popped up on the computer screen, which suggests that they believed the character was
not pre-determined by the experimenter. Second, question type was a between-subject factor and
thus the participants did not know what questions other participants were presented. Third, in the
post-experiment debriefing, only one participant mentioned gender-relatedness of the experiment
when asked what they thought the study was about.
Nevertheless, to examine how robust the character representation effect is in eliciting
gendered inferences about unknown CMC partners, as well as investigating how gender-
stereotypes would mediate informational social influence when the task itself is not gender-
biased, the second experiment was conducted using a gender-neutral topic. In addition,
Experiment 2 provided an opportunity to validate the male-resistance-to-female-influence
account in a gender-neutral context.
Experiment 2
When the task at hand clearly favors one gender over the other in terms of perceived
expertise, the gender of the character was expected to elicit gender-typed reactions in the form of
differential acceptance of information, based on the match or mismatches between the task and
the gender of the information source. When there appears to be no clear-cut advantage of being
male or female in terms of task competence, gender stereotypes are likely to take different forms.
One simple yet plausible prediction is that men would evoke greater conformity to their opinions
than women, for people generally assume that men are more competent and knowledgeable than
Convention