Forschung

"All the world is gendered!" - Gender is one of the most socially relevant social categories. It is often unclear what exactly is meant by gender: biological sex, gender identity or self-assigned masculinity/femininity are just some of the components. Accordingly, in this focus area, we are looking at how gender can be defined and measured in a diversity-sensitive way. Adopting a performative, social constructivist perspective ("doing gender"), we ask how gendered self-experience can be influenced. In particular, we look at why men question their own masculinity, which individuals do this particularly strongly and what effects this has (e.g. approval of sexist statements, attitudes towards firearms). With our research on the threat to femininity (and its differences to the threat to masculinity), we are also addressing a long-standing research gap.

Another gender-related identity dimension is sexual orientation. Here, we investigate the role that gender stereotypes(communion and agency) play in the perception of people of different sexual orientations and the consequences that these have. Accordingly, we address various forms of discrimination, such as social exclusion or the discrimination of lesbian/gay people in the work context (e.g. attribution of leadership characteristics).

A completely new topic of our research is online dating behavior, which we investigate in real-world contexts (Tinder). We ask what effects experimental manipulations of sociosexual orientation (preference for short-term vs. long-term partners and sexual contacts) or of honesty-modesty as a personality trait have.

 

Selected publications:

Büttner, C. M., Rudert, S. C., & Kachel, S. (2024). Ostracism experiences of sexual minorities: Integrating target perspective and perception by others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, online first. doi. org/10.1177/01461672241240675

Kachel, S., Bloch, T., Bosson, J. K., Lorenz, L. L., & Steffens, M. C. (2024). Gaining masculine power through guns? The impact of masculinity threat on attitudes toward guns. Frontiers in Psychology. 15:1296261. doi. org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1296261

*Posio, P., Kachel, S., & Uclés Ramada, G. (2024). Morphosyntactic stereotypes of speakers with different genders and sexual orientations: An experimental investigation. Linguistics, online first.doi. org/10.1515/ling-2022-0143

Niedlich, C., Kachel, S., & Steffens, M. C. (2022). Sexual orientation information and hiring: Can individualizing information lead to negative stereotyping of sexual minority group members? Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 52(5), 1-18. doi. org/10.1111/jasp.12859

Kachel, S., Steffens, M. C., & Niedlich, C. (2016). Traditional masculinity and femininity: Validation of a new scale assessing gender roles. Frontiers in Psychology, 7. doi. org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00956

 

*Shared first authorship

The next time you are asked in a café whether you would like oat or cow's milk, try responding with: "What do I look like?". You'll get some interesting answers. Of course, the relevance and prevalence of an identity as an oat or cow's milk drinker is likely to be very low. However, the underlying mechanism is not: people express aspects of their social identity without explicitly communicating them, e.g. through their external appearance. And other people use these signals to form behaviorally effective impressions about people.

As part of this research focus, we investigate which signals (and specific signal characteristics) are used to express and perceive social identities. In addition to verbal signals (e.g. sounds, grammatical forms), we also analyze non-verbal signals (e.g. faces). We are interested in how existing signals can be validly depicted (e.g. clothing), to what extent identity expression and perception are congruent and what role different contexts and stereotypes play in this. For example, we were able to show that clothing offers symbolic protection against existential threats (such as the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine) by strengthening group identity.

 

Selected publications:

Kachel, S., Simpson, A. P., & Steffens, M. C. (2024). Speakers' vocal expression of sexual orientation depends on experimenter gender. Speech Communication, 156, 103023. doi. org/10.1016/j.specom.2023.103023

Gruber, R., Häfner, M., & Kachel, S. (2023). Dressing up social psychology: Empirically investigating the psychological functions of clothing using the example of symbolic protection. British Journal of Social Psychology, Online First. doi. org/10.1111/bjso.12700 REGISTERED REPORT

Kachel, S., Steffens, M. C., Preuß, S., & Simpson, A. P. (2020). Gender (conformity) matters: Cross-dimensional and cross-modal associations in sexual orientation perception. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 39(1), 40-66. doi. org/10.1177/0261927X19883902

Kachel, S., Simpson, A. P., & Steffens, M. C. (2018). "Do I sound straight?": Acoustic correlates of actual and perceived sexual orientation and masculinity/femininity in men's speech. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 61(7), 1560-1578. doi. org/10.1044/2018_JSLHR-S-17-0125

Kachel, S., Simpson, A. P., & Steffens, M. C. (2017). Acoustic correlates of sexual orientation and gender-role self-concept in women's speech. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 141(6), 4793-2809. doi. org/10.1121/1.4988684

In one of our research projects, we are investigating whether certain personality traits can reliably predict the general frequency of lying. Past work has so far focused on the influence of the personality trait Honesty-Humility and on Just World Beliefs.

 

Selected publications:

Reinhardt, N., Mikesch, M., Hoppe, L., & Reinhard, M.-A. (2024). Close replication of Paul, Lee, and Anshton (2022): Who tells prosocial lies?Journal of Research in Personality, 112, Article 104525. doi. org/10.1016/j.jrp.2024.104525

Reinhardt, N., & Reinhard, M.-A. (2023). Honesty-humility negatively correlates with dishonesty in romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(4), 925-942. doi. org/10.1037/pspp0000456

Reinhardt, N., Reinhard, M-A., & Schindler, S. (2023). Is peoples' belief in a just world associated with (dis)honesty in romantic relationships? Journal of Research in Personality, 105, Article 104396. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2023.104396

Another focus of our research is the recognition of true and false judgments. In these studies, participants are traditionally shown various video messages and then asked whether the people in the videos are telling the truth or lying. Two measures can be derived from this procedure, which are the focus of this line of research. Firstly, we can calculate the so-called truth bias, which describes the tendency to judge other people's statements as true, even if there is evidence of deception. On the other hand, we can determine the accuracy that results from the number of lies correctly classified as lies plus the number of true statements correctly classified as true. In a current project, we are investigating how the personality trait Honesty-Humility influences people's truth bias and accuracy.

 

Selected publications:

Schindler, S., Reinhardt, N., & Reinhard, M.-A. (2022). Challenges in detecting proximal effects of existential threat on lie detection accuracy. Current Psychology, 42, 22114–22126. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03237-