Does Culture Moderate Gender Stereotypes? Individualism Predicts Communal (but Not Agentic) Prescriptions for Men Across 62 Nations

Abstract

The cultural moderation of gender stereotypes hypothesis argues that societies assign the most culturally valued traits to men, the dominant group. Thus, in line with cultural ideals, collectivistic societies should assign men more communality, whereas individualistic societies should assign men more individualism. Using archival data, Cuddy et al. found evidence for cultural moderation in descriptive stereotypes. We argue, however, that cultural moderation should be tested using prescriptive stereotypes, which more directly reflect cultural ideals about how men and women should be. We also provide a more robust test using contemporary data from 62 countries from the Towards Gender Harmony project (N = 27,391), allowing multilevel modeling techniques. We found evidence for cultural moderation for communal (though not agentic) traits: Collectivistic (compared to individualistic) nations prescribed relatively more communal traits to men. Thus, we show that prescriptions for men gravitate more toward core cultural values than prescriptions for women.