Agency and Virtue: Dimensions Underlying Subgroups of Women

Previous research indicates that the stereotype of women can be considered to have 3 subgroups: housewife, career woman, and sex object. In 2 samples (N = 19 and 35), we found evidence that these subgroups can be reliably distinguished in terms of 2 dimensions: agency and virtue. Participants sorted 27 feminine traits and then rated these traits in terms of their agency and virtue. Cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling with property fitting were used to identify subgroups, to fit virtue and agency dimensions to the subgroups, and to test for differences among the subgroups in terms of virtue and agency. Across both samples, agency and virtue fit the subgroups well (average R ² = .75), produced many significant differences among the subgroups, and are consistent with a system-justification perspective of sexism (Glick & Fiske, 2001) in which a belief in women's virtue and lack of agency reflects and maintains status differences between men and women.     

Schaffer's Demon

Jonathan Schaffer (2010) has summoned a new sort of demon – which he calls the debasing demon – that apparently threatens all of our purported knowledge. We show that any debasing skeptical argument must attack the justification condition and can do so only if a plausible thesis about justification is false.     

American-Japanese Differences in Multiscalar Intensity Ratings of Universal Facial Expressions of Emotion

This study reanalyzes American and Japanese multiscalar ratings of universal facial expressions originally collected by Matsumoto (1986), of which only single emotion scales were analyzed and reported by Matsumoto and Ekman (1989). The nonanalysis of the entire data set ignored basic and important questions about the nature of judgments of universal facial expressions of emotion. These were addressed in this study. We found that (1) observers in both cultures perceived multiple emotions in universal facial expressions, not just one; (2) cultural differences occurred on multiple emotion scales for each expression, not just the target scale; (3) the directions of those differences differed according to the rating scale used and the expression being observed; and (4) no underlying dimension was evidenced that would account for these differences. These findings raise new questions about the nature of the judgment process and the role of judgment studies in supporting the universality thesis, the bases of which need to be explored in future research and incorporated in future theories of emotion and universality.