Auditory Stroop reveals implicit gender associations in adults and children

Gender provides a powerful social heuristic for structuring incoming information. Thus, it may be difficult to attend to aspects of a person’s sex without also activating irrelevant gender associations. In two experiments, an auditory Stroop revealed implicit gender associations. Participants categorized the sex of voices saying names and words stereotypically associated with male, female or neutral gender roles. Both adults and children were slower when the voice’s sex was stereotypically incongruent with the spoken word or name. Although both groups showed such interference, children—who are generally less flexible about gender roles—showed more interference in response to gender-stereotypical words (e.g., football) than names (e.g., Rachel), whereas adults showed the opposite pattern. Given the simplicity of this task, the auditory Stroop might be used both to tap into implicit gender associations and to investigate their development.