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Gender Role Violations and Identity Misclassification: The Roles of Audience and Actor Variables

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Abstract

When people violate certain social role norms, they risk false categorization into a stigmatized group. For example, heterosexual men who perform female stereotypic behaviors are often misclassified as gay. This identity misclassification is aversive because it threatens fundamental psychological needs. Findings presented here reveal that expectations of identity misclassification fuel heterosexual actors’ (N = 216) discomfort during imagined gender role violations and that audience variables that increase the likelihood of misclassification also increase role violators’ discomfort. Moreover, expectations of misclassification strongly predict people’s discomfort during gender role violations regardless of their standing along relevant actor dimensions (e.g., attitudes and self-views). These findings suggest that people’s—and particularly heterosexual men’s—expectations of identity misclassification are powerful mechanisms that underlie adherence to traditional gender role norms.

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Notes

  1. Of course, gay men may also resist female stereotypic behaviors, either to avoid being correctly identified as gay (Goffman, 1963), or to distance themselves from negative stereotypes about their group (Steele, 1997). While we believe that it is crucial to investigate the experiences of individuals with concealable stigmas, we focus here on non-stigmatized (i.e., heterosexual) individuals because of our interest in people’s expectations of inaccurate classification.

  2. Note that members of any stereotyped group should experience threats to their need for self-verification (and thus, coherence) to the extent that others perceive them through the lens of an inaccurate group stereotype. Persons undergoing IM, however, are falsely placed into specific social groups and thus face self-verification threats at the level of both specific self-views and broader social identities (e.g., one’s identity as a heterosexual man).

  3. We also looked at whether expectations of IM from a man mediated the link between actor sex and discomfort in front of an unfamiliar man, and whether expectations of IM from a woman mediated the link between actor sex and discomfort in front of an unfamiliar woman. In both cases, these analyses yielded the same patterns that we obtained with the indices of IM and discomfort that combined across male and female observers. To summarize, expectations of IM significantly mediated the link between actor sex and discomfort during a gender role violation regardless of the observer’s sex, zs > 2.25, ps < 0.03.

  4. We repeated all of these regression analyses treating IM expectations from, and self-conscious discomfort in front of, a man and a woman separately. In all of these analyses, expectations of IM predicted discomfort, βs > 0.20, ts > 2.40, ps < 0.02, and no interactions emerged between IM expectations and the actor variables, βs < 0.08, ts < 1.15, ps > 0.24.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, The University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Ave., PCD 4118G, Tampa, FL, 33620-7200, USA

    Jennifer K. Bosson

  2. Department of Psychology, The University of Oklahoma, 455 W. Lindsey, DAHT #705, Norman, OK, 73019, USA

    Jenel N. Taylor & Jennifer L. Prewitt-Freilino

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  1. Jennifer K. Bosson
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Correspondence to Jennifer K. Bosson.

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Bosson, J.K., Taylor, J.N. & Prewitt-Freilino, J.L. Gender Role Violations and Identity Misclassification: The Roles of Audience and Actor Variables. Sex Roles 55, 13–24 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-006-9056-5

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