Gender,sex roles,and attitudes toward war and nuclear weapons

The observation that men are usually more supportive of war than women had led several authors to suggest that masculinity plays a causal role in the decision to make war and stockpile nuclear arms. In order to examine the relationship between sex role orientation and attitudes towards war and nuclear weapons, gender and measures of sex role orientation were used to predict three attitudes about nuclear weapons and the use of military force. Two specific and two classes of hypotheses regarding the possible relationships among these variables were tested: masculinity, femininity, Masculinity × Femininity interaction, and Gender × Sex Role Orientation hypotheses. The results provided limited support only for the femininity hypothesis—that attitudes toward war are associated with feminine traits. However, neither masculinity nor femininity was found to be the only mediators of the gender/war attitude relationship, indicating that sex role orientation (and especially masculinity) should be given less emphasis when trying to explain the relationship between gender and attitudes toward war.The author gratefully acknowledges the helpful comments of Douglas Kenrick, Nancy Russo, and an anonymous reviewer on a earlier version of this paper.     

Configurational information in face perception

A new facial composites technique is demonstrated, in which photographs of the top and bottom halves of different familiar faces fuse to form unfamiliar faces when aligned with each other. The perception of a novel configuration in such composite stimuli is sufficiently convincing to interfere with identification of the constituent parts (experiment 1), but this effect disappears when stimuli are inverted (experiment 2). Difficulty in identifying the parts of upright composites is found even for stimuli made from parts of unfamiliar faces that have only ever been encountered as face fragments (experiment 3). An equivalent effect is found for composites made from internal and external facial features of well-known people (experiment 4). These findings demonstrate the importance of configurational information in face perception, and that configurations are only properly perceived in upright faces.