Commentary: On the Equal-Opportunity Jerk “Defense”: Rudeness Complicates Sexism Attributions but Comes at a Cost

Abstract

Sexism is a pervasive and persistent problem. In their 2022 article “The ‘Equal-Opportunity Jerk’ Defense: Rudeness Can Obfuscate Gender Bias” (Psychological Science, Vol. 33, pp. 397–411), Belmi et al. argued that sexism can be obfuscated and go unpunished if perpetrators also act rudely toward men: the “equal-opportunity jerk defense.” We introduce a simple Bayesian model that accounts for Belmi et al.’s findings and corroborated their predictions and implications in five preregistered experiments (N = 6,968 U.S. adults recruited via Prolific). We replicated that being rude toward men decreased perceived sexism but importantly found that it came at the cost of increased punishment (Study 1). Moreover, rudeness primarily decreased actors’ perceived sexism, whereas their actions were still perceived as sexist (Study 2). Sexism ratings were sensitive to prior beliefs about the prevalence of sexism and to the diagnosticity of observed sexist behavior (Supplementary Studies S1-S2), in line with a broader Bayesian perspective. Bias in sexism ratings thus need not implicate fallacious cognitive processes or an “illusion of gender blindness.”