When Do Counterstereotypic Ingroup Members Inspire Versus Deflate? the Effect of Successful Professional Women on Young Women's Leadership Self-Concept

Three experiments tested whether and when exposure to counterstereotypic ingroup members enhances women's implicit leadership self-concept. participants read about professional women leaders framed as similar to versus different from most women (experiment 1) or having the same versus different collegiate background as participants (experiment 3). experiment 2 manipulated similarity by giving false feedback about participants' similarity to women leaders. in all cases,seeing women leaders reduced implicit self-stereotyping relative to controls but only when they were portrayed as similar to one's ingroup (experiment 1) and oneself (experiments 2-3). leaders portrayed as dissimilar either had no effect on self-beliefs (experiment 1 and 3) or increased implicit self-stereotyping (experiment 2). dissimilar leaders also deflated participants' career goals and explicit leadership beliefs (experiment 3). finally,implicit self-beliefs became less stereotypic regardless of whether women believed the similarity feedback,but explicit self-beliefs changed only when they believed the feedback to be true (experiment 2). © 2012 society for personality and social psychology,inc.