Internalised Sexism Theory

527 participants were invited to take part in our study. The group of participants was a mixture of male and female adults. All of them were happy to take part in the experiment and were recompensed by some partners of ours at the end of the project. From the beginning on, we had a clear and well structured expectation of the outcome of the sexual scandal experiment. Not only us but many others too can imagine that most people would treat a sexual scandal with the case of a female politician involved differently from a case with a male politician involved. This is actually due to a theory called “Sexual Double Standards Theory” which says that a man involved in a sexual affairs gets more accepted within a society than a woman. Oliver, Shilby

The bias in this case is the “Internalised Sexism Theory” which says that women internalise the social expectation that they should not behave in sexually permissive ways and will therefore seek to promote this value in their everyday lives, far more than men do. This would have the result, that they would be less tolerating sexual scandals, what would oppose those former mentioned ideals. When we have a look at both, the Sexual Standards Double and the Internalised Sexism Theory, we can see that both theories together explain why both men and women will judge the sexual scandal of a female politician more harshly than the other one. In-group bias, is one of the moderators which could have an impact of the study. The resulting hypothesis is that women will be judged by male and female survey takers more harshly. This could maybe have the effect of causing women to be more tolerant towards each other and thus make them to judge female politicians involved in scandals less harshly. The hypothesis just mentioned is based on Taifel´s Minimal Group paradigm in which it is said that group affiliation might be a basic custom in human behaviour. The result of it is the group favouritism effect. However, this could be moderated by the System justification Theory, which says that in-group bias is weaker among low status groups, as they rationalise their low status and then discriminate against their own group. This would treat as equal to women who internalise the stereotypes towards themselves and how they should react to sexual affairs and eventually acting upon them. This would have the effect that in-group bias would have not much influence on the results of the study and how female participants react to sexual affairs because it will be balanced out by the System