Influence of motivation and task difficulty on gender discrimination judgements

✍ Scribed by Christel G. Rutte

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 119 KB
• Volume: 28
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0046-2772
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-0992(199803/04)28:2<275::aid-ejsp848>3.0.co;2-g

✦ Synopsis

A study is reported examining how motivation to detect salary discrimination in¯uences its detection depending on the diculty of the detection task. Subjects were presented with information about the quali®cations and salaries of female and male managers in 10 departments of a hypothetical company. This information was created so that female managers were undercompensated relative to their quali®cations. The main dependent variable was subjects' ratings of gender discrimination. Independent variables were motivation and task diculty. Based on Hull's drive theory an interaction eect was predicted and found: when the judgement task was easy, more gender discrimination was detected when motivation to detect discrimination was high rather than low, whereas when the judgement task was dicult, more gender discrimination was detected when motivation to detect discrimination was low rather than high.