The success of using biological sex to divide or segment markets requires a thorough understanding of how men and women process and respond to advertisements and other persuasive communications. Toward this end, this research (N = 64; 32 men and 32 women) studied how college-age men and women respond to printed advertisements. There were no differences between the sexes in recall and recognition of claims in advertisements, but men and women generated different types of message relevant thoughts—women generated more category thoughts and men generated more attribute thoughts, suggesting that, while women and men might not differ in the depth of processing, they might use different processing styles.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
American Psychological Association. (1994) Publication manual. Washington, DC: Author.
2.
BurnkrantR. E.HowardD. J. (1984) Effects of the use of introductory rhetorical questions versus statements on information processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 1218–1230.
3.
CupchikG. C.PoulosC. X. (1984) Judgments of emotional intensity in self and others: the effects of stimulus context, sex, and expressivity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 431–439.
4.
EaglyA. H.WoodW. (1991) Explaining sex differences in social behavior: a meta-analytic perspective. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17, 306–315.
5.
EinsteinG. O.HuntR. R. (1980) Levels of processing and organization: additive effects of individual-item and relational processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 6, 588–598.
6.
EinsteinG. O.McDanielM. A.OwenP. D.CoteN. C. (1990) Encoding and recall of texts: the importance of material appropriate processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 566–581.
7.
GearyD. C. (1996) Sexual selection and sex differences in mathematical abilities. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 19, 229–247.
8.
GoosL. M.SilvermanI. (2002) Sex related factors in the perception of threatening facial expressions. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 26, 27–41.
9.
GrewalA. S. (1998) Sex differences in algebra by secondary school students in Transkei, South Africa. Psychological Reports, 83, 1266.
10.
GrierJ. B. (1971) Nonparametric indexes for sensitivity and bias: computing formulas. Psychological Bulletin, 75, 424–429.
11.
HelgesonV. S.FritzH. L. (1998) A theory of unmitigated communion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 173–183.
12.
HuntR. R.EinsteinG. O. (1981) Relational and item-specific information in memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 20, 497–514.
13.
HuntR. R.SetaC. E. (1984) Category size effects in recall: the role of relational and item-specific information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 10, 454–464.
14.
HydeJ. S.LinnM. C. (1988) Gender differences in verbal ability: a meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 104, 53–69.
15.
IonescuM. D. (2000) Sex differences in memory estimates for pictures and words. Psychological Reports, 87, 315–322.
16.
IonescuM. D. (2002) Sex differences in memory estimates, revised. Psychological Reports, 91, 167–172.
17.
LynchJ. G.Jr.MarmorsteinH.WeigoldM. F. (1988) Choices from sets including remembered brands: use of recalled attributes and prior evaluations. Journal of Consumer Research, 15, 169–184.
18.
MaccobyE. E.JacklinC. N. (1974) The psychology of sex differences. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univer. Press.
19.
Meyers-LevyJ. (1989) Gender differences in information processing: a selectivity interpretation. In CafferataP.TyboutA. (Eds.), Cognitive and affective responses to advertising. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Pp. 219–260.
20.
Meyers-LevyJ.MaheswaranD. (1991) Exploring differences in males' and females' processing strategy. Journal of Consumer Research, 18, 63–70.
21.
Meyers-LevyJ.SternthalB. (1991) Gender differences in the use of message cues and judgments. Journal of Marketing Research, 28, 84–96.
22.
NyangeniN. P.GlencrossM. J. (1997) Sex differences in mathematics achievement and attitude towards mathematics. Psychological Reports, 80, 603–608.
23.
PeracchioL. A.TyboutA. M. (1996) The moderating role of prior knowledge in schema-based product evaluation. Journal of Consumer Research, 23, 177–192.
24.
PettyR. E.OstromT. M.BrockT. C. (1981) Cognitive responses in persuasion. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
25.
SinghS. N.ChurchillG. A. (1986) Using the theory of signal detection to improve ad recognition testing. Journal of Marketing Research, 23, 327–336.
