Hanna Szekeres

Recent conservative political rhetoric support women having careers but emphasize that this should not be an obstacle to having children. We propose that this sentiment reflects the hierarchy of gender norms in today's society whereby motherhood is the ultimate role that women are expected to fulfil and denying such role evokes social penalties, above and beyond other prescribed gender norms. Across five experiments ( N = 738), we predicted and found that voluntarily childless women elicit more negative reactions than mothers, and importantly, also more than women violating other gender norms in the realm of occupation (Study 1), power (Study 2) or sexual orientation (Study 3). We demonstrate that these patterns cannot be explained merely by a perceived lack of communal qualities of the non‐mothers (Study 4) and also show that involuntary childless women do not receive the same negativity (Study 5). We discuss this, often neglected, gender bias and its resistance to social change.

The present study examines the effectiveness of moral‐exemplar interventions in the context of recurring oppression and historical trauma. Moral exemplars are individuals who have risked important aspects of their lives to save the lives of members of other social groups. In two experimental studies (total N = 405), we tested the hypothesis that presenting ingroup or outgroup moral exemplars improves intergroup relationships. We also tested the effects of the prototypicality of moral exemplars by manipulating the frequency of helping behavior in the perpetrator group. We used open‐ended questions to qualitatively investigate how participants viewed moral exemplars. We failed to find positive effects of moral‐exemplar interventions. The qualitative analysis confirmed that the in‐group moral exemplar could be used as an “alibi” to justify the in‐group's transgressions, while the outgroup moral exemplar was subtyped. Importantly, our findings do not invalidate, but complement, the moral‐exemplar intervention literature by offering insights into future work with such interventions.