Processing performance evaluations in homogeneous task groups: Feedback and gender effects

This experiment investigates the development of performance expectations in status-homogeneous task groups. The issue of central interest is whether or not gender is a factor in expectation formation when group members are of the same sex and work on a gender-neutral task. Male and female undergraduates, participating in same-sex dyads, worked first individually and then as a team on a novel, visual perception task. Apart from the feedback they received from the experimenter at the end of the individual performance phase, participants were given no information with which to form differentiated expectations about self and partner for this task We investigate effects from both sex of dyad and level of feedback on: (a) influence behavior during the team phase, and (b) selected variables obtained through self-reports. Rejection of influence data show statistically significant effects from feedback only. Self-reports, on the other hand, reveal significant results from both feedback and sex of subject across several assessments of self's and partner's competence, and from sex of subject in some of the items concerning perceptions of the experimenter's status. Different conditions for the emergence of such effects in behaviors as opposed to self-reports are identified and discussed.