Being emotional makes you seem unreliable
Popular psychology assumes that women are seen as less believable than men because they are more emotional. But things are more complicated than that.
Men cry less than women – but they all come across as unreliable when they do it. | Image: iStock.com/Enes Evren
Whoever acts emotionally comes across as unreliable, regardless of gender. This is the finding of a study carried out by Rodrigo Díaz, a philosopher and psychologist at the University of Bern, together with his colleague Manuel Almagro from the University of Granada. But they could find no proof for the popular notion that women are more often consigned to the stereotype of being ‘emotional’ and are therefore regarded as less trustworthy than men.
Rodrigo Díaz is investigating why certain social groups are discriminated against. “Sexism is a typical case”, says Díaz. There is a basic popular assumption that runs: women are more emotional than men; if someone offers emotional arguments, their credibility suffers; ergo, women are less believable than men.
Díaz investigated this assumption in an experiment with 250 subjects. They were told to read the report of a fictitious emergency phone call to the police. Half of the subjects read the report of a woman ringing the police. She believed – so the story ran – that her husband had committed suicide, because he had disappeared several days before. The other half read a report supposedly given by a man about his wife, but with the exact same story. Afterwards, the subjects had to assess how emotional the caller had been, and how believable their descriptions were. Regardless of whether the caller was a man or a woman, their highly emotional state made them unbelievable. But the subjects did not assume such emotionalism on the part of the woman caller any more often than on the part of the male caller.
Díaz and Almagro have only been investigating one variety of sexism. “But women certainly suffer under other stereotypes”, says Díaz. He now wants to carry out further studies to investigate when these stereotypes result in sexism.
