Being incidentally exposed to a sport context: same consequences on gender schema activation as being in a sport context?

The main goal of the present research was to examine whether the activation of gender schema would be indifferent to the method of induction: placing individuals into contexts or incidentally exposing them to contexts. Based on Clément-Guillotin and Fontayne's (2011. Situational malleability of gender schema: The case of the competitive sport context. Sex Roles, 64 , 426–439) study examining gender-related information processing efficiency while explicitly placing individuals into contexts, we investigated the same aspect while incidentally exposing individuals to contexts. We hypothesized that an exposure to a single, powerfully gendered context ( i.e. , competitive sport) may be sufficient to render gender and sex categories accessible when compared to a gender-neutral context ( i.e. , cinema). Three studies showed that participants primed with a competitive sport context were faster to respond to gender attributes and to indicate their own sex than participants primed with a cinema context. This underlines that the activation of sex and gender category systems is not identical when being incidentally exposed to versus actually being immersed in a gendered context. While explicitly placing individuals into a gendered context seems to activate a single gender schema dimension related to the context, being incidentally exposed to a single gendered context seems to activate both gender schema dimensions.