Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Two experiments examined the moderating effects of the influence agent’s gender and self-proclaimed competence on informational social influence in computer-mediated communication. In a 2 (participant’s gender: male vs. female) X 2 (partner’s character: male vs. female) X 2 (partner’s confidence: high vs. low) mixed-design experiment, participants played a trivia game with an anonymous partner. Experiment 1 showed that when the partner’s confidence was presented in quantitative form, its effect on conformity was more pronounced among men than among women. In Experiment 2, when the partner’s confidence was verbally expressed, however, the effect was reversed: Women displayed greater vigilance to the partner’s confidence than did men. In both experiments, the partner’s gender, inferred from randomly assigned gender-marked characters, did not affect perceived competence of the partner nor the susceptibility to informational social influence, casting doubt on the Expectation States Theory predicting the attribution of greater competence to men than to women.