人如其食：食物性别刻板印象及对人物评价的影响

Abstract

Interpersonal evaluations refer to people's perception of someone and how they judge personalities based on existing information. Recent research has focused on food gender stereotypes and their effect on impression evaluations. However, past studies on food gender stereotypes were mostly conducted within Western cultural context, while few studies were based on non-Western culture, and unsystematically only focused on the impressions of sexual attractiveness, personal qualities, or masculinity/femininity. Therefore, this study examined whether food gender stereotypes exist in the Chinese cultural context while investigating these stereotype effects on impression evaluations based on the Big Two model, which provided a good theoretical basis and measurement index. We hypothesized that the Chinese also held food gender stereotypes and had different impression evaluations on individuals consistent or inconsistent with food gender stereotypes of different genders. To test these hypotheses, we performed two separate studies. In total, 788 participants were recruited online and 132 through advertising on campus. Study 1 comprised examining whether participants held explicit and implicit food gender stereotypes using open nomination, self-reporting, and semantic priming paradigms. Study 2 involved measuring participants' evaluation of competence and warmth on individuals with given food gender stereotypes using questionnaires and Implicit Relational Assessment Procedures. Results revealed that both genders held the explicit food gender stereotype of "men like masculine food and women like feminine food," but only women held implicit food gender stereotypes. Additionally, participants reported higher evaluations for competence and lower evaluations for warmth on men who were consistent with the food gender stereotype, while for women who were consistent, participants thought they were warmer but less competent. Implicitly, both genders held stereotyped evaluations that inconsistent men were warmer. In conclusion, this research explored and examined the unique content of food gender stereotypes in the Chinese cultural context, which deepens the understanding of food gender stereotypes and contributes significantly to the field of cross-cultural food gender stereotypes. Furthermore, we creatively combined our study purposes with the Big Two model and systematically investigated people's evaluation of individuals with consistent/inconsistent food gender stereotypes in two aspects, which has important implications for future research.