The present study examined some effects of Stereotype Threat priming on participants in a two-person prompted discussion. Four pairs of participants (one man, one woman) each discussed three workplace scenarios and were prompted to give suggestions for the workplace conflicts. Each scenario was preceded by one of three prompts. The first prompt did not mention that gender was relevant to the study, while the second two prompts mentioned that it was, and that the tasks were measurements of leadership ability and relationship maintenance ability respectively. These four sessions were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed to see whether a given participant or pair’s verbal behavior changed between their non-specifically and gender-specifically primed discussions. Three of the features analyzed were the opening sequences of each discussion, participants’ rate of hedging, and rate of conversational fillers. Analysis of the opening sequences for each discussion indicated a difference in a pair’s verbal behaviors in the sessions that were preceded by a priming-prompt. Hedging rate across all four pairs showed a difference after the priming prompts. In three pairs, women’s hedging rate increased when the task was framed as indicative of leadership ability and men’s hedging rate increased when the task was framed as indicative of relationship maintenance ability. In the fourth pair, the effects were the opposite and to a similar degree. There was no noticeable change in conversational filler use.
